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Sep 12
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344: Confidence-Forming Habits with Jordan Harbinger

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Jordan Harbinger says: "People who ask for things... are the ones who get them."

Jordan Harbinger shares mindsets and practices to boost your confidence and your results with people.

 

You’ll Learn:

  1. The secret strengths of introverts
  2. Why to ask for what you don’t deserve
  3. How a post-it note can transform  your non-verbal communication skills

About Jordan

Jordan Harbinger has always had an affinity for Social Influence, Interpersonal Dynamics and Social Engineering, helping private companies test the security of their communications systems and working with law enforcement agencies before he was even old enough to drive.

Jordan has spent several years abroad in Europe and the developing world, including South America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and speaks several languages. He has also worked for various governments and NGOs overseas, traveled through war-zones and been kidnapped -twice. He’ll tell you; the only reason he’s still alive and kicking is because of his ability to talk his way into (and out of), just about any type of situation.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Jordan Harbinger Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jordan, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jordan Harbinger
Thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate the opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am excited to chat because you’ve been an inspiration for me in podcasting. You kind of got me going on the three times a week as a matter of fact, so that – we have you to blame for that.

Jordan Harbinger
Right, so if you can’t keep up with this podcast, it’s largely my fault for also making it impossible to keep up with my podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, one fun thing that I learned about you from your IMDB profile actually – someone’s a big deal – is that you were at one time an FBI informant. What’s the scoop here?

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, when I was actually essentially a kid, when I was younger, I had figured out how to – do you remember green boxes on the side of the road that were like, “Hey, what’s that thing? I guess it’s a phone thing.” Do you remember those things?

Pete Mockaitis
Kind of, but what is it?

Jordan Harbinger
Kind of. Yeah. Not exactly a tourist attraction. I figured how to open those. When I opened them I saw all these screws in there with wired pairs. I went, “Oh, what are these?”

I remember stopping on my bike once when I saw one of the lineman – the telephone company guys, not the football guys – opening that thing up. I said, “What are these?” He goes, “Oh, every house in the neighborhood, all the phone wires, they run right into this box, so each of these pairs is someone’s phone.”

I said, “Oh, and that little orange handset you’re using you can listen to the call.” He goes, “Well, I don’t do that, but I can use it to test the line if someone’s on the line when I put it on there I get this little red light. I don’t hear anything.” I said, “Oh, okay.”

I decided that I was just going to get one of those and open that thing up with the – because you needed a special wrench, as if that’s hard to find. I would get that and open those up and I started listening to conversations and I started to get really interested in people and really interested in the phone system because I could learn more about people through the phone system.

I learned how to clone, which is sort of like hack in a general sense, I learned how to deal with that with cellphones, analog cell phones. That was obviously really quite interesting for me. I started to clone these cellphones. The FBI was like, “Hey, this is actually a crime. You should probably not do that.” But I started to tell them how certain technical things were done and they were interested in that.

Then one day, I worked for a security company and that security company was intern contracted by a really wealthy Detroit area billionaire. I went into work one day at the security company and I was like – we were talking about dating or something like that because my boss was like, “Hey, how are the ladies treating you?” That kind of thing. I was 16 years old.

I said, “Oh, I’m actually meeting women on the internet.” He’s like, “What?” because this is 1995 or 1996. It’s like what are you talking about. I would tell him how I would chat with essentially girls at that age on America Online. He’s like, “Oh, this is so fascinating.” He would ask me about it every time I’d go to work.

Eventually I started working with the – with him on talking with the FBI about the technology stuff, but then one time we started talking about the dating on America Online or the chatting on instant messenger, which we used at the time.

I started saying – it’s funny because I had this really sort of ambiguous unisex sounding username. Some people on there thought I was a guy and some people on there thought I was a girl. I always had to say like, “Oh yeah, I’m a 16-year-old guy live in Troy, Michigan,” whenever I was talking to people.

Pete Mockaitis
ASL.

Jordan Harbinger
ASL, right? Age, sex, location. I eventually started to see people hitting me up. I was like, “Oh hey, I’m a guy. You don’t want to be sending me a picture of a rose or something,” and they’re like, “Oh, okay, sorry.”

Then some people were really creepy about it. I was like, there’s all these guys on there that are like 40 that are totally okay with me being a 16-year-old boy. What a bunch of weirdos. I told my boss about this and he goes, “Yeah, that’s not okay, man. Those are sexual predators. We need to report these people to the police.” I said, “Well, all right.”

We called the police; they had no idea what to do with it. We contacted the FBI, who I had already sort of been talking about with the tech stuff and they were like, “Yeah, we don’t really how to handle this. We have a cybercrime division in Washington, D.C., but no individual office,” again, this is the ‘90s, “has anything to do with computer crime because it’s so advanced.”

Computer crime back then was bank wires probably and really advanced Matthew Broderick dialing into the Pentagon-type of crime, not somebody chatting on America Online. There was no crime to be had there. There was no financial transactions. PayPal didn’t exist. You couldn’t bank online, etcetera.

I started talking about this and they said, “Look, show me what you’re dealing with,” because they thought, “Oh yeah, some pervert’s trying to get you to send a picture with your shirt off or whatever. Who cares?” I sent them transcripts of these emails and other things in chat rooms, because remember back in the day you had whole rooms of people talking.

Some of it was just really, really, really not cool, like really gross and graphic. It’s like who are these people? This is a 14-year-old girl. Look here where she says to another user how old she is and where she lives. Then this is where this guy says he’s 45 and works at Radio Shack.

I started to send those things in by fax, of course, to the FBI and they went, “Oh, wait a minute. This is like really – there’s really – this is really bad.” Because there were guys saying like, “Yeah, I’ll come over to your parent’s house when they’re not there and take pictures of you. You’ll be a model,” like that kind of stuff.

They started saying, “Look, we can’t ask you to do anything, but the more of this we get, the better our case is going to be against some of these users when we go to a judge for a warrant and try to sort of look at this person’s email and all that stuff.”

I started just going into chat rooms and I even made different screen names and I would get into chats with these people and stuff like and I would fax all the transcripts to the FBI. We caught a bunch of pedophiles.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger
We caught a ton. Yeah, we caught a bunch. I was in Michigan, so what we would do – essentially the crime itself online was multi-state, which brought it to the FBI jurisdiction, but what we ended up doing was Toledo, Ohio was pretty close to the southern border of Michigan, so the ruse at that point was “Oh, I’m going on vacation with my family to Toledo. We’re going to be at the Holiday Inn and this place.”

Then the guy would drive from Michigan to Toledo and the FBI, the local PD would be there and they’d be like, “Well, you just traveled across state lines to engage in inappropriate conduct with the minor, so now you’re ours. You’re not Toledo PD. You’re not Detroit PD or whatever suburb PD. You’re FBI and we have all the chats.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger
It was just like boom.

Pete Mockaitis
And Chris Hanson says, “Why don’t you take a seat over there.”

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, that’s exactly what it was. When I first saw that show, I went, “Oh yeah, they’ve been doing this for a long time.” This is not a new operation. In fact, as far as I know, we were one of the first people ever to do this because if I had to talk to Washington, D.C. FBI just to tell them how pedophiles run America Online in ’96, I don’t think there was a whole lot of activity in that area at that time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, if you’re like the lead expert as a 16-year-old from Michigan.

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, as a 16-year-old boy with a dial-up modem is the lead expert on AOL sex crimes I guess you would call it, then there’s not a whole lot of expertise in the area. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jordan, you are full of interesting stories. You share a number of them along with guests on The Jordan Harbinger Show. Tell me, what’s your show kind of fundamentally all about?

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, what I do on The Jordan Harbinger Show, what we do as a team, is we interview amazing brilliant people, in my opinion, and we study their thoughts, their actions, their habits, and then we have them teach their ways to the audience.

For example, I had – I just earlier today interviewed the former head of the CIA and NSA, General Hayden. I said, “Look, how are you making these tough decisions? How are you balancing people’s freedom with the fact that you have to defend us against terrible people?” Or I’ll talk to Larry King and I’ll say “Tell us about conversational skills. You’ve had 60,000 interviews. You must have picked up a couple of tips along the way.”

I’ll have them teach those skills to the listening audience. Then every episode has worksheets. It’s really practical. It’s not just like, “Wow, gee, that was so inspiring. Thanks for coming on.” It’s like, “No, here’s five things you can now do to become better at conversations, networking, body language, persuasion, influence, etcetera.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Clearly we have much synergy between our shows, so it’s so good to have you here. I’ve learned a lot from you, particularly in the realms of confidence, likeability, relationships, communications, like that universe.

Now you’re going to be, if you will, the Larry King is to interviewing and Jordan Harbinger is to likeability/confidence stuff. Let’s go there. What’s sort of your secret sauce or your flavor behind – it seems like, if I may, following you for a while, it’s like you’re kind of a dork. I say that in the nicest way.

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. No, you don’t have to – not kind of. I mean it’s well established, my friend.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet you’re also super freaking cool at the same time. You’ve got a real good vibe going, which serves you well as an interviewer and broadcaster, but I’m sure many other circumstances. What’s going on in your head in terms of where your seeming abundance kind of confidence and self-assuredness is coming from?

Jordan Harbinger
Where does my confidence come from?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger
Well, yeah, it’s definitely not something that I just woke up one day and I was like I’m good at this. I certainly – it’s funny, people who’ve known me my whole life, they go, “It’s so funny that you ended up being a talk show host interviewer. It’s just comedy.”

Because when I was a kid I was an only child, so imagine I spent a lot of time watching TV sitcoms, first of all, which actually is where I learned a lot of my cheese ball sense of humor because people who know me for a long time will be like, “Oh yeah, I remember you watching The Fresh Prince for seven years straight and just talking and being funny in that way.” I sort of have a humor evolution from Perfect Strangers all the way on up to Seinfeld or Friends.

Pete Mockaitis
The highest echelon of evolution.

Jordan Harbinger
The highest echelon of culture, naturally. But the reason that happened was because I could either sit there and watch baseball with my dad, who like – he’s a smart guy, but he’s an engineer, so his communication is primarily grunting and then getting frustrated when you don’t understand exactly what he means. Then my mom, who loves reading. I’m an only child, so I’m just sitting there like, oh my gosh, I’ve got to – I’m not doing a whole lot of talking.

Then when I was in school, I just found that either things were so boring that I would get in trouble, and then I had like the typical middle school, I wouldn’t call it social anxiety any more than a normal kid has, but instead of me being – acting up and trying to be one of the in-crowd, I just kind of was like, I’m just not going to talk. If I’m invisible, then nobody will bother me. You know that kind of thing?

I did that for years. That persisted even through a little bit of high school. Then in college I studied really hard. I wasn’t concerned with partying and stuff because I thought you get one shot at this. Then I went to law school, not exactly known for its outgoing super social well-adjusted people, especially at that level where I was studying. Then I worked on Wall Street.

The fact that I was able to then leave that and develop a talk show host and interviewer skillset was really a large pivot. But it wasn’t as big of a jump as I think a lot of introverts think. Because when we’re introverted and as we know from new science now, things like Susan Cain and her book and her work, introverts are actually better at forming relationships and generally having conversations with people that are meaningful.

Because – I say we because technically I’m still an introvert. I don’t think that’s something you really shake. We think more about what we’re going to say before we say it. We think about other people’s feelings, what repercussions is this going to have, how’s it going to make the other person feel, how is this going – what conversation should this be like, whatever do I want to put into this conversation to make it worthwhile.

That’s the type of thing that introverts think of, which is why we seem quiet and reserved. We are indeed, but also we’re not just talking because well, if I talk a lot, people will think I’m cool. We don’t have that.

If we talk enough, we go “Oh, I just want to go home and not do anything,” whereas an extrovert says, “Oh, I’ve been working all day, I just want to go out and have drinks and chitchat.” It’s like we don’t rest that way, introverts.

The pivot seems strong, but really it’s just a use of a skillset that I had for a long time. I was always the guy that people would ask for advice. I was always the people – I was always the guy people would say, “I trust you to keep this secret for me. My parents are getting divorced.” I’m like, “We’re in third grade. Why are you telling me this?” That was kind of thing that I always had.

I think it was me putting people at ease because I wasn’t necessarily fronting all the time. I wasn’t trying to be cool. I was just me because I didn’t have the skills to be anybody else or even try to fake it. That I think is why I ended up in this particular niche doing this particular gig.

But I do think that all of us, especially if we think, “Oh, well I’m working at this company and I’m never going to be this outgoing or this person or this type of person that’s going to be a manager, an outgoing leader.” I think we should take a second look at that because a lot of times the things that we think about us are a disadvantage, are often symptoms of an advantage that we have that maybe we haven’t explored yet, similar to the introvert thing.

“Oh, I’m too quiet. I could never be a radio talk show host interviewer.” Well, that’s not really true. All of the characteristics that make you quiet, you think before you talk, that’s actually really beneficial to somebody who wants to have a meaningful conversation in any format, whether you’re a writer or you’re speaking on a microphone.

The shyness, yes, you’ll have to get over eventually. But shyness and being introspective and quiet are actually totally different things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that good stuff there. I’m actually a certified Myers Briggs practitioner. I train people on this all the time.

There’s a lot of aha moments in terms of we sort of assume or project onto the other person, “Oh, if I’m extrovert and I’m quiet, it means I’m bored. I’m disengaged. I don’t care, whatever. Therefore, that person is thinking, feeling the same thing.” It’s like au contraire.

[15:00]

As you very nicely articulated, the introvert is kind of operating on all of these maybe deeper levels of consideration about what would be the implication if I say that and the repercussions to the other person, how are they thinking and feeling about that. That’s very well said.

I want to dig into a little bit of that repercussion piece when it comes to thinking about maybe if folks are overly cautious or worried about offending or being rejected or rubbing people the wrong way if they speak up about something, what’s your take on how to overcome those sorts of fears and anxieties?

Jordan Harbinger
Sure. I think for a lot of people this is a slow – I won’t say it never goes away. I will say that it’s slow to go away. It’s not like one day you’re working on this and you finally feel like “Ah, this is gone now.” It’s more like you stop noticing it, if that distinction makes sense.

The way that this works will be something like rejection therapy for example, where you go – some of the drills that I give clients from The Jordan Harbinger Show or for Advanced Human Dynamics, which is our training arm, are things like I’ll point them to the negotiation episodes that we did where most people are using that to get a raise in their salary or they’re using those types of skills to get something else for work or business.

But I’ll also say, “Look, the next time you go to Starbucks ask for a discount.” People will go, “Oh God, I can’t do that. It’s awkward. It’s weird.” So what though? You’re in an airport. You’re in an airport; you’re never going to see that barista again. It’s not the one that’s a block away that you go to every day, where you might actually face consequences. Ask for the discount and the worst they can say is no.

You have to work up courage, of course, to do this kind of thing, but as you do that and you experience positive results, which most people do –

You’d be surprised how many places, by the way, have some sort of discount button that automatically knocks 10% off the price because, “Oh, you’re in the office building above us. 10% off.” “Oh, the manager is standing next to me and that’s totally fine because she’s seen you before. 10% off.” That happens all the – “Oh, you brought your own cup. 10% off.” That kind of thing, always, cafes, restaurants, that happens all the time.

As we experience positive results, we start to say “Well, wait a minute, if I got that by asking, what else can I get by asking?” We used to have all of these different sorts of drills to lead up to that. I won’t spend too much time on that because I don’t want to take up the whole show with it, but a lot of what these do is they build small pieces of situational confidence that then lead to greater confidence in other areas.

If you are able to ask for what you want or a benefit when you actually don’t deserve one, like you do not deserve a discount on that coffee. You don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
But I’m so adorable, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger
But I’m like, if you ask for that and you get it, then you start to think, “Well, wait a minute. There’s a whole world of possibility that doesn’t make me an entitled jerk for exploring.” Once you start to do that, then you can build on to bigger and bigger things.

When you frame things in the way of negotiation, like, most people do deserve to get paid more than they actually are. Or I should say they’re bringing more value than they’re actually paid. I think in many ways you get paid what you negotiate in certain corporate structures, not necessarily what your value is.

Once you start to realize that you think, “Well, wait a minute. There’s somebody else-“ because chances are, think about this right now. You’re working in a corporation if that’s what you’re doing. I know a lot of your audience is doing that. There’s probably somebody at your same level that’s making more than you and you have no idea.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Jordan Harbinger
The reason you have no idea is because HR cut them a deal with they negotiated with that person and part of it was “I will not tell anyone else what I’m making.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And that is illegal in some countries. Fun fact.

Jordan Harbinger
I didn’t know that. Really?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it is. You cannot do that in certain countries for the very reason that it is a disservice to workers or employees or wage earners, but business owners and HR folks in the US will – it’s to their advantage. There’s an awesome Adam Ruins Everything, if you’ve ever seen that show,-

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
-episode about this. I was like, “Right on Adam. You preach it.” Yeah, it’s a little bit kind of taboo I guess in the US to discuss those things, but it’s generally to the employees benefit when they do. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger
Interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m vibing. I’m vibing with what you’re saying there. I’m also vibing with that statement there: ask for what you don’t deserve. I’m thinking I don’t do that very often.

Jordan Harbinger
No.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m wondering if it’s because my sense of justness or rightness or fairness or is being compromised. Set me straight, Jordan, why and how is it cool to ask for what you don’t deserve?

Jordan Harbinger
It’s social pressure, right? The reason we don’t do it. We have some unwritten rules that say look – I’m not saying walk into Wal-Mart and then walk out with a lawn chair and be like, “Can I have this for free?” They’re going to be like, “No,” and then you’re going to apply pressure and turn the screws.

We’re not doing this thing where we’re going to a local mom and pop restaurant, eating a full meal and saying, “I’m going to pay you half of what you asked for for this.” You’re just giving people grief at that point.

But when you’re talking about, “Hey, can I have a discount on this coffee?” Nobody sat down and went “Look, this is the morally acceptable price for us to charge for this cup of coffee.” They went, “People are willing to pay five dollars for this mochaccino. Charge these morons five dollars for that mochaccino,” if that’s a real thing.

If you ask for a discount, Starbucks is still profiting handsomely off of you. They want you to come back. They might do this all the time. There’s a reason they give away free stuff all the time. There’s a reason they have all these rewards programs. They incentivize that way. You’re not stealing from them by asking because you’re giving them a choice. They’re fully allowed to say no.

It’s not when they say no, you walk up to the shelf with all the ceramic mugs on it and knock it over. You’re not doing that. You’re just walking up to the counter and saying “Can I have a discount on that?” Sometimes they just go, “Sure.” Or you say, “Can I have a discount on that? I’ve had a really long day and I would love to just have one thing go right,” and they go, “Yeah, sure. My pleasure.”

Pete Mockaitis
It is their pleasure.

Jordan Harbinger
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re giving them an opportunity to delight you and that’s worth something.

Jordan Harbinger
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re doing them a favor by asking for that. That’s my reframe. I’m rolling with it.

Jordan Harbinger
And frankly it’s often worth about 15 cents, so it really doesn’t matter that much, but it’s nice to have anyway. The reason we ask for what we don’t necessarily deserve in those instances, not because, great, I’m saving a quarter on a cup of coffee. The reason we do that is because imagine how much easier it then becomes to ask for something that you do deserve.

“I know I’m underpaid by five grand a year. Oh, but I don’t want to make my manager’s manager angry. I know that times are tight right now.” No, this is a negotiation. You deserve more than what you’re getting. Other people at other offices are getting paid more for doing the same amount of work and they have better benefits. You should be leveraging that.

By asking for small little things, and again, coffee is not necessarily going to lead to a bigger raise for you, but it can over time compound and you will find not only are you enjoying some benefits of that, but you gain a sense of control over things, namely your environment, that you may not have otherwise had.

Then it starts to lead to the idea that, “Well, wait a minute. If I can negotiate a discount on the cup of coffee that I don’t deserve, then maybe I can negotiate the 5,000 dollar raise that would be a qualitative lifestyle difference for me that I actually do deserve that other people are getting that I’m not because I’m nice, too nice.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m digging it. I’m digging it. Time is already flying here. But Jordan I’ve got to get from you a couple, if I may, pro tips in terms of being likeable or charismatic or kind of winning people over-ness, if that’s a word. What are some of the top foundational principles or tips that you share in that realm?

Jordan Harbinger
Sure. I used to be one of those like, “Well, look people in the eye. Have a firm handshake and positive-“ and I still do the positive, upright, confident body language thing. In fact, I’ll give you guys a – why don’t I give you a body language drill. This is always a nice easy one that people can learn in an audio only format.

I would say some of the major benefits come from developing relationships and networks that really help other people because you can have the greatest nonverbal communication of anybody in the whole world, but if I’ve thrown you three – four show guests or I’ve introduced you to somebody who you ended up marrying or got you a job, you’re just going to like me a little bit more than the guy who has a firm handshake and good eye contract. At least, I hope so.

The body language and nonverbal stuff does have its place though. I think for a lot of folks, especially I used to think this way as well, we often think, “Huh, well my first impression happens when I open my mouth, so I’ve got to have cool, fun, entertaining things to say.” This really actually is not true.

We know that we form our first impressions nonverbally before the other person even has the opportunity to open their mouth.

If you don’t believe me, next time you go to the mall and you’re walking down the street, listen to the little voice in your head – not the one that says walk faster, it’s cold outside – but the one that says, “That person is small. That person is tall. Oh, that person is kind of scary. Should I cross the street? No, I’m just being weird. They’re fine. Oh wow, this person is attractive. I wonder-“

That voice, you’re making judgments about people constantly. We’re evolved to do that. It’s something that keeps us safe and has kept us safe for millennia. We do this. It’s not bad. It does not mean you’re a judgmental jerk. We do this.

Now what this means for us is that our first impression is already made well before someone walks up and says, “Hey, can I borrow a quarter for the payphone? I’ve got to catch the bus.” Whatever. That is not the first impression. That’s the second impression generally speaking.

This happens just as well in corporate environments, at a mixer or something like this. We generally form that first impression within milliseconds. As soon as someone becomes a blip on our radar, we form some judgments of them based on their nonverbal communication.

What we want to do is make sure that our first impression, nonverbal first impression, is upright, positive, confident, friendly, open, all these nice positive adjectives that we can throw out there.

The way that we do that is essentially, unless you’re driving right now, you can follow along with me, stand up straight, chin up, chest up, shoulders back. You don’t have to exaggerate this. This is not like superman pose or anything. It’s just sort of upright, positive, confident, friendly. Put a smile on your face.

We want to do this every time we walk through a doorway because that’s generally when people notice us is when we walk through a doorway. Of course, the problem with that is we walk through doorways all day, so you’re going to walk through a doorway five seconds from now, forget to do this and then everything goes to heck.

Grab a stack of Post-It notes, maybe those little ones that have absolutely no use other than what I’m about to tell you because they’re too small. If you don’t have those, go grab a pack of that from the office supply room or go to the drugstore and grab it. Stick them up at eye level on the doorway. You don’t even have to write anything on it.

What this is going to do is it’s called a pattern interrupt in psychology slash hypnosis speak. What that is is you look at your doorway, you don’t see anything because you walk through it all day. But you look at your doorway, you see a hot pink Post-It note at eye level on the doorframe and you go, “What is that? Oh right, the doorway drill that Jordan was talking about.”

You walk through that doorway and you straighten up. You reset your body to that open, upright, positive, confident body language. You do this in your own home. You do this in your office. You do this when you go out to the break room, the conference room. I don’t think anybody’s going to be too suspicious of a Post-It note on a doorframe in an office.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re not going to snag it away on you.

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah. If they do, you just replace it because they keep on refilling that office supply container, don’t they? Or you put a little note there and you write on it ‘Do not remove’ and it will be there for like five years and people will go, “What is that thing?”

Pete Mockaitis
What the heck is this thing?

Jordan Harbinger
I don’t know. Don’t touch it though. It says ‘Do not remove thanks, MGMT,’ so the management obviously put it up there.

When you do that you start to reset your nonverbals. What this does is it trains you to reset throughout the day that open, upright, positive, confident body language. Within three to six weeks, you’re not going to need the Post-Its anymore. You’re going to have that nonverbal communication going all the time.

What this does, this is great, because then the next time you go to a meeting, a mixer, a conference or Starbucks, whatever it is, you have your body language and nonverbal communication set the right way.

When people form those first impressions of you based on that nonverbal communication, they start to treat you differently. When people start to treat us differently, we actually start to behave differently and there’s a lot of science, which I probably don’t need to go into that proves this. I don’t think that anybody would even argue with that anyway.

When we start to be treated differently and we start to behave differently, then essentially the core of who we are begins to change for the better. We start to behave as if we are indeed entitled to smiles and that coffee discount and-

Pete Mockaitis
You’re worth smiles, Jordan.

Jordan Harbinger
You’re worth smiles. You’re worth smiles. You’re worth people turning around and looking at us and actually being pleasantly surprised that somebody friendly walked in. You’re worth it.

That trains us to behave differently, which is a higher level of social status than we’re typically accustomed to. That’s powerful. It’s kind of like getting taller.

If I can commission a study, I would want to compare the social status equated with being tall or wealthy with the social status equated with high-value charismatic social behavior because there is science to this effect, not using the doorway drill of course, that shows that people who are outgoing, friendly, positive and confident, do enjoy higher levels of income, larger networks, more career satisfaction.

The idea that you can get that from Post-It notes is pretty powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
I was just going to say and it all starts with a hot pink tiny Post-It note.

Jordan Harbinger
That’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. I love it because we had BJ Fogg on the show talking about tiny habits and that’s a potent tiny habit.

Jordan Harbinger
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
It takes mere seconds to do. We have a clear trigger. It has highly leveraged results flowing on the back end. That is a slam dunk. Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me Jordan, any really top things you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Jordan Harbinger
I’ve actually – I love these little drills for networking and relationship development. I think relationships are the most important lever in business and me having had to restart my business in The Jordan Harbinger Show within the last six months, again, after doing my other show for 11 years and bringing this new show, The Jordan Harbinger Show, to 3.8 million downloads a month and already in the top 100, the relationships are what did it.

People go, “Well, you’re really good at what you do.” Thanks a lot, but really it’s the network. I want to just underline/highlight/emphasize the fact that relationship development is one of the most crucial skills that anyone can build. At the end of the show maybe we can plug some of the drills and exercises that I’ve developed similar to the doorway drill that will help with that and people can go and grab those.

But I want to highlight that because I think people put networking off until later. They’re like, “Oh well, I got a new boss right now and I’ve got to bust my tail for this. Then I’ll worry about networking,” or “I don’t need a new job right now. I’m really satisfied where I am, so I don’t really need to network inside my industry or outside it. I want to spend that time doing other things.”

I understand those arguments but they are erroneous because the problem is you cannot make up for lost time. When it comes to building relationships, you have to dig the well before you’re thirsty because at the time you eventually need that network, you are far too late. That’s a tough lesson to learn in real time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jordan Harbinger
Oh sure. Something that I find inspiring. I use to really love “Fortune favors the bold.” It sounds great in Latin. But that sort of sounds a little bit bro these days, so I’m going to share that quote with the caveat that what that really means … our earlier conversation is that people who ask for things that they want or they think they deserve are the ones that get them.

Seldom do things sort of flutter down and land in our lap. That’s usually the right place, the right time, a whole lot of luck. I really do like the idea that fortune favors the bold.

I think that Abraham Lincoln even had something like – or this is one of those internet quotes, where it’s totally not Abraham Lincoln, but it’s credited as him slash Mark Twain. But I think he said something like, “Good things come to those who wait, but it’s only what’s left over by those who hustle.”

Pete Mockaitis
Got you.

Jordan Harbinger
I love that one as well. It’s very similar.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Jordan Harbinger
Favorite book. Gosh, I read so much. But I really love Extreme Ownership, which of course is written by Jocko Willink, who’s a Navy SEAL. It’s full of these kinds of cool battle stores from Ramadi and Iraq. But really what extreme ownership is about is figuring out what part you’ve played and pretty much any failure or any problem.

If your team fails and your boss totally misled everyone and half the team quit and it was just you and one other person and that person got the black plague and had to stay home for two months and you’re the one that did all the work, you still look at what part you played and what you could do differently later.

Because externalizing blame or faults or anything is always, even if it’s 100% valid, like, “Look, we failed because I had to do this alone with no help.” “Okay, that’s the main reason why you failed. The other reason is, well you decided that it was going to be impossible six months ago, so you kind of resigned yourself to failure.” “Well, yeah, but it was never going to work.” That doesn’t matter.

Extreme ownership means look all the way at every facet, all the way up and down the food chain and figure out what you could have done differently because if you don’t do that, then basically you didn’t learn anything other than woe is me.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. How about a favorite habit?

Jordan Harbinger
Favorite habit. Every day I wake up, and this is also in my networking drills that I’ll share later in the show, every day I wake up and I usually have an alarm for around 10 AM. I don’t wake up at 10 AM, FYI, I wake up around 5:30, but I have the alarm set for around 9 to 10 AM depending on what time zone I’m in.

I scroll all the way down to the bottom of my text messages and I text the five people – those are the texts where it’s like two years old, where it’s like, “Hey, where are we meeting for lunch?” and you’re at some conference in Washington, D.C. Those are people you haven’t spoken to since that lunch.

I’ll text them and I’ll say, “Hey, it’s been a long time. I hope this is still your number. This is Jordan Harbinger. I just wanted to check in. What are you working on lately? Where can I be of service? Would love to touch base with you,” something along those lines. You make sure you sign your name, so that you avoid new phone, who dis.

You also say no response necessary if you’re really busy. That actually increases your response rate by about 30% from about 40-something to 70-something. The reason is because then – when people build urgency because they’re trying to sell something it’s usually like, “Contact me right away,” so of course when you get a text like that you’re thinking, “Wait, I haven’t talked with Pete for like two years. Is it Herbalife or is it Scientology? What is this going to be?”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s ….

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, right. But if someone says, “Hey, look, I know you might be really busy so no urgency. You don’t have to get back to me if you don’t have time.” People are like, oh well, clearly this isn’t somebody trying to be like “Once in a lifetime urgent opportunity.” It’s like, “Hey, look, get back to me if you want.” People usually go, “All right, this is a social thing,” so they’ll do it.

I do this pretty much every day. Some people don’t reply and other people do. You end up with the craziest opportunities. You’ll reengage a couple of people, nothing will happen.

But then once a week, twice a week someone will say, “Hey, Jordan, it’s funny you texted me because I’m about to walk into a meeting where we’re going to decide on our speakers for this year’s annual corporate retreat. Do you speak? Would you be down to do that? It’s in Hawaii. It’s not a bad deal. The fee is really low, but we’ll pay you to go out there.” You go, “Sure, yeah, I’d love to do that.”

Let me tell you, I’ve gotten some crazy opportunities as a result, including literally trips to Hawaii to go speak at corporate retreats because that person just happened to get that text the morning before the meeting. I guarantee you they were not thinking of me as a candidate for that before they walked in the door and before that text came in.

It’s a number’s game. It costs you nothing. Half the time you’re at an airport gate, at Starbucks, taking a break, lounging, waiting for your coffee machine to finish pouring something. We’re talking minutes per day.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that take, especially the non-urgent piece. It reminds me of the one time I sent a low importance email and I got a ton of replies. It’s like “What exactly is this low importance message? I’m very intrigued.”

Jordan Harbinger
That’s funny.

Pete Mockaitis
So good. Jordan, tell me do you have a final challenge or call to action or if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them to?

Jordan Harbinger
Yeah, a lot of the drills that I’m talking about, so the texting, reengagement stuff, the doorway drill that I mentioned, I’ve got dozens of these and I give them away for free at AdvancedHumanDynamics.com/LevelOne, AdvancedHumanDynamics.com/LevelOne or if you just go to The Jordan Harbinger Show on any podcast app, you can hear me talk with brilliant people.

But level one will teach you a lot of this amazing stuff. It will change your life. It’s all free, just to be super clear. It’s not something I’m selling.

These are the habits I wish I had like 15 years ago because I started doing them about 10 years ago and I just think the amount that I got, the benefit I got from doing this for so long has been so enormous that any day that I didn’t do this, it’s kind of like dang.

I highly encourage people to do this now because it doesn’t matter where you are in your career, whether you’re new or this is something you’ve been doing for a while. There’s a lot here. I teach the same stuff to military, intelligence agencies, corporations and I’m giving a lot of it away there at AdvancedHumanDynamics.com/LevelOne.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Jordan, thank you for that and taking the time. This has been a whole lot of fun. I wish you and The Jordan Harbinger Show all the luck in the world.

Jordan Harbinger
Thanks Pete, I appreciate it.

Sep 05
0

341: Decoding Body Language with ex-FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Joe Navarro says: "We are always transmitting information."

Joe Navarro shows how to get to the bottom of body language and why observing it can better your relationships at work and at home.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why it’s so hard to tell if someone’s actually lying
  2. Four key, reliable body language cues
  3. The one good mannered behavior everyone should know and use

 

About Joe

For 25 years, Joe Navarro worked as an FBI special agent in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment. Today he is one of the world’s leading experts on nonverbal communications and lectures and consults with major corporations worldwide. He is an adjunct professor at Saint Leo University and frequently lectures at the Harvard Business School.

 

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Joe Navarro Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Joe, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Joe Navarro
It’s great to be here, Pete. It’s a long time coming.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. Well, I’m super excited that I’ve been a fan of your work from afar for a good long time, so now here we are. But first I want to hear about how you got a pilot’s license when you were 17. Is that even legal or what’s the backstory here?

Joe Navarro
I don’t know how you dug that up, but not many people know that. That’s true. It was a funny thing. A lot of people make fun of our school systems, public schools in particular, but I was fortunate to go to a public school where the science class that was offered was aeronautics.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Joe Navarro
No, it was great. It was in Miami, Florida and you could study ground school, basic ground school. I took that when I was 16. Then once I turned 17 then I could begin to take flight lessons and I did, which you say, “Well, what do you do with that?” Well, interestingly enough, when the FBI came looking for me that was one of the things that set me apart.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting, so during your time in the FBI did you do some piloting?

Joe Navarro
Yeah. In the Bureau, you wear a lot of hats. The first four or five years, it was pretty much about learning the business of being an FBI agent, working counter-intelligence, but along about the fifth or sixth year there was a real shortage of pilots. We used aircraft for surveillance. They knew I had a license, so I did. I got somewhere around 2,000 hours.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh cool.

Joe Navarro
Yeah, it was pretty nice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is cool. I have very little piloting experience, but I had a buddy who had a little four-seater Cessna in San Francisco. I’ve only piloted for like five minutes, but part of it was over the Golden Gate Bridge. It seems like that would be hard to top. It was just breathtaking.

Joe Navarro
Oh, it’s just a lot of fun. Once you get up to altitude and you can relax, you’re not worried about other aircraft, it really does give you a different perspective on the world. I used to take the airplane over to Miami Beach and fly along the coastline. It was – you’re 17 years old and you say, “This is pretty good. This isn’t bad.” Yeah, it was fun. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. You’ve written 13 books now and were a special agent with the FBI and are quite an authority on body language. I want to get into some particulars of body language signals and how to read it, what to do with it.

But first, I’d love it if you could set the scene for us with some drama. We had Chris Voss on the show. I’m just going to go out on a limb and say FBI agents make great podcast guests. Two for two so far. I asked him if he could give us a dramatic tale to kick us off, so I’ll put you on the same spot.

Can you think of a time where, boy, a body language signal or insight just sort of changed the whole story for an interrogation or an investigation or something you were working with?

Joe Navarro
Yeah. One of the books that I wrote was Three Minutes to Doomsday. In that book, I talk about this individual who was willing to cooperate or seemed to want to cooperate with the FBI, but he was hiding a lot of information. When we asked him to come forward and tell us the truth because he didn’t really have all the access to classified material that we knew had been stolen, he said he wasn’t going to reveal their names.

One of the things that we decided to do since we understood body language was to basically not trick him into revealing it, but getting him to reveal it at a subconscious level. What we did was we wrote the names of everybody that could possibly be involved on a three-by-five card. As we showed him each three-by-five card, we said, “Will you tell us a little bit about what their personality was like?”

What he didn’t realize was that when you see something that can hurt you, your pupils squint. His pupils and his eyes squinted on two names of the 32 that we presented. Then we sent agents out with the army to two military bases, one in Alaska, one in Georgia. On the two names that he squinted, both of them confessed.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh wow. That’s good.

Joe Navarro
What’s interesting, Pete, is he wasn’t lying. He said, “Look, I’m not going to tell you anything.” What he didn’t know was how he was going to react.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Joe Navarro
We know from studies of babies, eight – nine months old, when they see somebody they don’t like or they see something that is not pleasing to them, oftentimes they will squint, turn away, or their pupils will actually constrict.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve got a little seven-month-old at home. I hope he doesn’t do that to me shortly.

Joe Navarro
No, that will come when they’re 14.

Pete Mockaitis
Daddy, I’m tired of you.

Joe Navarro
Pete, you’ve got 14 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh cool. You’re latest here is called The Dictionary of Body Language. How would you frame or position this one in terms of kind of the main idea and how does it kind of fit into your opus and the catalogue of the other books?

Joe Navarro
Well, that’s a great question, Pete. It was one of these things where when I wrote What Everybody is Saying, which became the number one-selling body language book in the world years ago. It’s been at the top for the last eight years. There were only 140 behaviors in there.

Two years ago I was talking to my agent, Steve Ross, at Abrams. He said, “I’m looking at your book.” I said, “Well, I hope you’re learning something.” He said – he kind of said, “Is that all there is?” I said, “No, that’s not all there is.” He says, “Well, how many behaviors do you think are important and we should know about?” I said, “Well, the problem is, is how do we write it? There’s many behaviors.” I said, “Let me look through my notebook.”

I’ve been keeping notebooks on behavior for years and years and years. I went through and I said, “Well, I’ve got about 600 in here.” He said, “Well, let’s talk about it.” We talked about it and then we reduced it down to just over 400 because some of them replicate because they’re similar behaviors.

He said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book, but making it like a field guide, where you can quickly look something up and there’s a paragraph and it says, ‘if you see this, then you can interpret it this way?’” He liked the idea. He took it to Harper Collins and Harper Collins said this would be a great follow-on to go from 140 behaviors to over 400. That was – there is your opus, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s cool. That’s cool. So good. I loved What Everybody is Saying. I’m looking to forward to getting into all the more depths of The Dictionary of Body Language. Thank you for writing it. It’s just fun.

I’ve got a ton of things I’d love to dig into. Maybe I’d like to hear your take on – so when it comes to sort of gauging people’s true intentions, and I know that’s one of the juiciest areas of the body language stuff, it’s like, “How do I know when someone’s lying?” That seems to be popular for your poker books as well as maybe sort of untrusting partners or any number of contexts.

Why don’t we go with that first? How do you get to the bottom of people’s true intentions and whether they’re being honest with you?

Joe Navarro
I knew you were going to hit me with this because you always ask profound questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh shucks.

Joe Navarro
Let’s divide it up because when we’re talking about intentions, for instance, you’re talking to somebody and they’re right foot begins to orient towards an exit. Usually we begin to communicate, ‘I have to leave’ with our feet. Before they even look at their watch, before they say anything, we show intentions by foot orientation.

We show intentions such as ‘I really like that cake’ by literally leaning towards it. You see that in courtship behaviors. I’ve certainly sat at enough cafes and bars studying individuals and you can tell when they’re interested in each other.

But the more profound question is, well, what about detecting deception. I have to say both as someone who has been intimately involved in all aspects of forensic interviewing and in doing research for the books and for teaching that as Dr. Mark Frank at University of Chicago says, there is no Pinocchio effect. There is really no single behavior indicative of deception and we need to get away from that because we do a disservice to ourselves and to others.

I think it’s been too easy to say, “Well, I think you’re lying.” “Well, why do you think that?” “Oh, because I asked you a question and you were touching your mouth.”

Well, the fact of the matter is, both the honest and the dishonest do it and we do it because maybe we don’t like the question, we thing the question is too intrusive, maybe we think that you are not entitled to ask that question because of social status or whatever.

There’s – what I found interesting in doing an article for Psychology Today is I looked at the 261 DNA exonerations. As I delved deep and I contacted the people that had done the research, looked at the case work of the police officers, every one of them thought that the suspects were guilty and lying when they said they didn’t do it.

What’s interesting is not one police officer could identify who was telling the truth, but they all thought they could identify somebody that was lying. What does that tell us? What it tells us is that as Paul Ekman found in 1986, humans are terrible at detecting deception. We really shouldn’t be in the business of detecting deception.

Now, so what is it that we’re looking for? What’s interesting is, is that humans are actually very good at detecting when something is wrong, when there’s an issue. The question is we don’t know why.

Babies are born communicating comfort and discomfort. We humans immediately reveal discomfort through our bodies, whether it’s a heightened heart rate, a pulsing vein, pacifying behaviors, but what we don’t know is the why.

If I can tell you an FBI story, I was at – I worked mostly counter-intelligence. We were short of personnel one time and I was asked to do an interview of a white-collar criminal. This woman is called in and usually we spend the first 20 – 30 minutes getting people to calm down because obviously when you get called in by the FBI, it’s pretty nerve racking.

But as I’m talking to this lady, she seems to be demonstrating more and more behaviors of nervousness and tension. She’s biting her lip, she’s grabbing her collar, she’s squeezing her hands together. Finally, I said, “Ma’am,” I’m thinking to myself Joe, you’re the Bureau’s expert on body language, surely you know what’s going on here, so I thought I’d cut to the chase. This is a lesson in humility.

I said, “Ma’am, you look like you need to get something off your chest.” She said, “Oh, thank God Mr. Navarro because when I parked downstairs I only had a quarter in the meter.” Here were all the behaviors of nervousness and tension and anxiety, but what was the cause? The cause was she didn’t want to get a ticket, didn’t want to have to pay a fine.

As it turns out somebody had stolen her identity and filed some bogus claims, insurance claims and that’s why she was being called in. It was a – it really taught me a lesson about humility and saying all we can really say is that I’m seeing behaviors, they’re indicative of psychological discomfort. The question is what’s driving that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Then what’s interesting is some people can just be anxious in general I imagine. That is sort of who they are all the time and they’re just not that comfortable in their own skin or talking to other people or talking to strangers or talking to official people like judges and FBI agents.

Joe Navarro
Oh sure. Look, and not even nervousness, there’s people who don’t like to make eye contact, that really feel uncomfortable being questioned and so forth.

The investigator has to look at that and say, “All right, who am I dealing with? What are the baseline behaviors?” Then if they do notice behaviors – I mean if you ask somebody “Where were you last night?” and if a question like that causes them to look like they’re doing trigonometry, the question then becomes, why does a simple question cause so much mental turpitude? Why is there so much cognitive loading going on? But then that’s for the investigator to figure it out.

As an agent, I can tell you that no matter what people said, we always had to prove what they said. It was a matter of if I asked a question, how did they react to that question. No matter what their reaction was, I needed to pursue it anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Although, what’s cool though is with those 32 names because you got an indicator you were able to really accelerate that hypothesis, like we have a good reason to suspect these are the two to go after rather than going through all 32.

Joe Navarro
Right, well, it’s because I understood that when an object or a name or something is a threat to you, that you react to it. Now, what was important was not to give any indication of – that anyone of these individuals was any more special than the others. It was just a matter of what can you tell me about their personalities and then watching for their reactions. We lucked out with that.

Now, if the two men hadn’t confessed, certainly we couldn’t go to court and say, “Well, Judge, we think they’re guilty because this guy blinked.” It doesn’t work that way.

In the same way that when a child comes home and – or a spouse comes home and they’re having some sort of difficulty. Maybe it doesn’t help to ask any more questions at that moment. Maybe it helps to delay it to another time so when they’re relaxed you get a better read to find out, “Oh, is somebody bullying you at work or at school or somewhere else?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay, so that being established in terms of it’s hard to know whether someone’s lying or deception, but rather you just kind of get a sense for what’s causing discomfort. I’d love to hear out of the 400-ish behaviors, what are some of those that are kind of like the most reliable, like, “Pete, over 90% of the time when I see this behavior, it tends to mean that thing.”

I remember from What Everybody is Saying, you said some things to say about feet and how it’s absurd that in interrogation rooms there are opaque desks and they need to be transparent so that we can observe their feet.

It was like this is a guy who speaks from experience because I’ve never seen anyone or heard anyone go on a rant quite like that. I dug that. Tell me is it the feet or what are some of the most reliable tell-tale things to look toward?

Joe Navarro
Well, actually one of them you just did. You did what’s called eyelid flutter.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy, what’s it mean?

Joe Navarro
Eyelid flutter we do when we are emphasizing something, when we feel negative about something, when we’re flustered by something. You were channeling me there quite accurately.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Joe Navarro
When I wrote about interviewing and how you’re a paid observer and here you’re sitting for an interview and the person’s hiding behind a desk and you cannot even see their feet or their hands or their torso. I was like I cannot believe that you as a professional cannot see the object of the interview and they’re hiding behaviors that are critical.

As you were channeling that, your eye – you did the eyelid flutter. Eyelid flutter is very accurate when we’re struggling with something.

But you mentioned the feet and I think this is one of the things that was astonishing. There’s a really good section in the new book, The Dictionary of Body Language, dealing with the feet because I got so many questions over the years after I wrote that of people saying, “Well, is there anything more about the feet?” I said, “The feet are very accurate because they reveal our emotions and we tend not to hide them.

In the same way that we might do a social smile, the feet, if they don’t like you or if you don’t like someone, your feet will move you away from that person. You will immediately rotate away. If you’re excited and happy to see someone, you can hide a smile, but try to hide the feet of a child.

I was just at the airport the other day and a little kid arrived with a family. They were going to Disney. Every time the mother mentioned Disney World, the child’s feet were jumping up and down. She had happy feet. You can’t hide that.

Even with adults, poker players soon found out that you can see the happy feet of a player that has a monster hand just by the shirt shaking. The feet certainly have a lot of information.

You were talking about what are some of the more accurate significant ones. There’s another one that you do, which is great. It’s the gravity defying behaviors of the eyebrows.

Pete Mockaitis
I just did that before you – the first – we don’t have the video for the listeners. It’s fun that you started with the video. It should have occurred to me, of course he wants the video.

Joe Navarro
Yeah. Well, because it’s very instructive. You can see how excited you are about things because you arch your eyebrows and you go, “Well, what about this and what about that?”

Think about the times when you greet somebody and they arch their – they flash their eyebrows and they go, “Hey, how are you?” and compare that to other times when you greet someone but you don’t have those behaviors and you realize, “Oh, that just doesn’t feel the same. There’s something going on here.”

I often get this with – when – I’ve taught many clinicians over the years. They say, “A lot of times these couples come in and they say, ‘Well, I had no clue that she didn’t love me anymore or he didn’t love me anymore,’” I say stop right there. There were plenty of clues. You just didn’t see them. You just didn’t see them.

You didn’t see the eyes that never flash when they see you.  You never saw that two years ago she was touching you with her fingertips rather than with her full palm hand. You didn’t notice that rather than smiling at you, it was more of a little smirk and the corner of her mouth was pinched, which shows disdain and so forth. I said there’s always behaviors there. The question-

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so sad.

Joe Navarro
Well, it is, but the argument that I never saw it coming.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Joe Navarro
One of the important things I really believe Pete is that if we’re sensitive to other people’s body language, we make better friends and better mates because we early on can begin to sense “Oh, there’s an issue. Something is wrong.” To wait for something six months, two years on, is sometimes too late.

I think if you begin to sense that “Oh, my partner, she’s bored watching TV another night and when I mention going out, her eyes light up.” Well, that’s a clue.

In the same way that as parents we look at the baby for every single little sign of a smile, of any kind of discomfort because we transmit information fairly much in a binary fashion, comfort, discomfort. The same thing applies in real life. That’s part of having that social intelligence, but it’s also about equity, what we bring to the table as a partner and as a parent to ensure that those we love are cared for.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful, yes. It’s funny, I’m thinking about my buddy Muhammed, who’s going to be on the show a little later. It’s exciting. That is one – I always feel very – I don’t know, I guess, welcomed or liked, appreciated when he greets me because his eyebrows really do do that. I guess I have not articulated or thought of that specifically until we really got precise about that fact just now. That’s intriguing.

We’ve got some feet. We’ve got the eyelid flutter. We’ve got the arching and lifting of eyebrows for excitement. What are some other big ones?

Joe Navarro
Let me give you – yeah. Let me give you one that is just a remarkable behavior. It really stands out with women. In part because oftentimes their necks are more exposed than men because we tend to wear shirts that have high collars or we wear a tie and a coat or – and so forth. Women have more of an open neck.

The behavior is covering of the lower neck area. There’s a little dimple there called the suprasternal notch. The suprasternal notch is just above the sternum and that’s why it’s called the suprasternal.

Pete Mockaitis
… Okay, yeah.

Joe Navarro
Invariably when someone is struggling with something, having difficulties, is insecure, there’s a little bit of fear, they will immediately bring their hand up and cover this very sensitive area of the neck. Men, we tend to mask it by grabbing our necks more robustly and grabbing our shirts. Women tend to just put their finger on it.

In fact, just the other day, in fact I think the day we talked or we emailed each other, there was an attack on a speech that was being given in Venezuela, on the President of Venezuela. It was a drone attack of some sort. While all the soldiers stood there at attention, being mindful of their duty, the First Lady, as soon as she sensed that something wrong, her hand immediately went to the suprasternal notch to cover it.

This is a very ancient behavior. This has to have been with us for tens and tens of thousands of years. Maybe even longer because it’s seen in every society. It’s been seen in every culture. Interestingly enough, it’s been seen even with children who are born blind, who have never seen the behavior and yet they perform this behavior when they feel threatened or scared.

I would say it’s one of those behaviors that it’s probably in the 95 to 96 percentile of communicating that something is wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good one.  That’s a good one. Any other sort of top, top probability items coming to mind?

Joe Navarro
Yeah. One of the ones that I talk about in the new book is – has to do with what is in essence a reserved behavior. Reserved behaviors are those behaviors that we really hold back until something is really stressing us and then they come out. We don’t tend to do them every day, but every once in a while when something is really bad.

One of those reserved behaviors is with the fingers. Now in the previous book I talked about steepling, that’s where you put your fingertips together and you straighten them up and it looks like a church steeple.

Pete Mockaitis
It makes me think of evil genius.

Joe Navarro
Right, like Mr. Burns.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent Joe.

Joe Navarro
But this behavior is very similar, except that the fingers are rigid straight and they interlace and the person sort of rubs them back and forth with very straight fingers. And I started to see this behavior probably in the ‘80s, with people in – who were going to be interviewed, people who were in trouble.

I also verified it by looking at these very old videos. They weren’t even videos; they were 35 millimeter movies from the 1950’s of couples in therapy. One of the things that I found was that when they were about ready to say, “Look, this relationship is over,” they would often do this behavior.

I call it teepee hands because when they interlace and the fingers are straight, if you were to hold it right in front of you, it looks like the top of teepee with the poles sticking out.

I tell parents, “Look if you’re talking to a child and they start to do this behavior, because they do it subconsciously, put your iPhone away and pay attention because something is significant here.” This is a reserve behavior.

We have another reserve behavior, which is kind of interesting. I hadn’t written about it before, but it’s in the new Dictionary of Body Language, and that’s called facial denting.

Facial denting is – you often see this at sporting events where the score is really close and you’ll see people squeeze their cheeks to the point where as you look at them you say, “Surely, that’s got to hurt. They’re going to pop a tooth.” They’re squeezing themselves so tight.

That’s one of those reserve behaviors for when we’re dealing with a lot of stress and we don’t know what the outcome is going to be.

Why we do that it hasn’t really been very well studied. I’m hoping – one of the things that I’m hoping – you were asking me earlier what are some of my hopes for this book. My hope is that researchers will look at it and say, “Okay, so here are things that this FBI guy over 40 years picked up by watching people. Let’s go and test it. Let’s go and verify it. Let’s go validate it.”

I hope they tear into it and they try to demonstrate that it’s universal or not universal, that it’s peculiar to this area of the world or that world or that it’s used when we’re stressed or unstressed or whatever. But I’m hoping that the average person can use it to learn, but I’m also hoping that the researchers will look at things that they’ve never looked at before.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. Just to note, that if you’re seeing the teepeeing or the facial denting that we’re dealing with something serious here.

Joe Navarro
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. I can think of a buddy who everything was going wrong on his wedding day in terms of things coming together. So and so didn’t pick up his tux and this person’s late and he’s getting all these texts. It was a lot of stuff. He was sure doing some good squeezing there. That all makes sense that it was intensely troublesome for him, but it all worked out. They got married. They’re happy and it’s good.

But that’s cool. Well, I’d love to hear maybe precisely or more specifically when it comes to in the world of professionals in their day-to-day job/career lives, what do you think are some of the most helpful things to be on the lookout for in terms of what you’re observing or what you’re projecting.

I’m thinking about things like maybe someone is bored or thinks that idea is wrong and just a terrible – I think that happens a lot in meetings. Someone says something and someone thinks, “That is a terribly bad idea,” but they don’t say anything because they don’t want to stick their neck out. That’s the big boss. They don’t want to offend or insult. Are there any indicators along those lines or other helpful kind of career scenarios?

Joe Navarro
Well, I’m glad you asked that question because it’s really a good question. I would have to say number one, if you’re taking notes, write this one down. We are always transmitting information.

A lot of people think, “Oh, I’m in the parking lot. Nobody’s going to notice me,” or “I’m in the elevator. Nobody’s going to notice me,” or “I’m sitting outside for an interview. Nobody’s noticing me,” or “I’m at the end of the table. Nobody’s going to notice me.” Stop right there. Welcome back to Planet Earth. The fact of the matter is that you are being observed constantly. People are picking up on everything.

Let’s go through a few of the things that you probably never thought about. Good manners. Manners are non-verbals, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you, sir.

Joe Navarro
If you see a piece of paper on the floor and you pick it up and you put it in the garbage can, that is a behavior. You don’t have to talk to do that one.

How you talk to people, your intonation, how quickly you respond, do you face them or do you roll your eyes before you answer them and so forth. Good manners is a non-verbal.

The fact of the matter is, is that we’re all being scrutinized. People look at us and they notice how well groomed we are. Walk into an office and change your haircut. People will – “You’ve got a different haircut.”

You probably have gone through your life thinking, “Nobody notices me.” No, everybody notices. They notice if you’re wearing glasses. They’re noticing if you wear new glasses, if you change your hairdo, your color, if you’re not well-groomed, if all of the sudden you’ve gone from really nice clothing to really tattered clothing. They notice-

Pete Mockaitis
They’re noticing the wrinkles in my Polo shirts, Joe? Do I have to start ironing these things?

Joe Navarro
Yeah. It makes you think. Shakespeare was right, life is theatre and we’re on stage.

For a lot of jobs, how we look may not matter, but the fact of the matter is that for a lot of jobs it does matter. It matters how we, as clinicians say, how we present. Are we on time? Are we eager? Are we leaning forward? Are we interested?

Something so simple. We were talking earlier about great behaviors. Here’s one behavior that you need to build into your repertoire.

That’s when people are talking to you that you tilt your head slightly because we know that from a very young age babies respond to this and it’s a behavior that says “I’m listening to you. I’m interested. I don’t have an agenda for the moment and I’m actively listening.” It’s a very easy behavior to emulate, especially with children and loved ones.

I live in a community not far from central command where there’s a lot of Navy SEALS. These guys have great bodies. They’re like world-class athletes. But I notice how they talk even to their spouses and they look like drill sergeants. It’s like they can’t stand down.

I think one of the things that enhances communication, especially with loved ones, is if we can stand down and relax and tilt that head and just say, “I’m listening and tell me about your day,” and not look like we’re looking for the next marching orders.

I have to say a lot of executives come home and do the same thing. They have that very stern, I’m in charge sort of look. We know that humans respond to that look of interest and kindness.

Pete Mockaitis
Interest, kindness, kind of letting go and not being in charge, tilting the head. Any other kind of indicators of “I’m listening. I’m interested. I’m not bored. I’m not formulating a response. I’m not getting my argument ready?”

Joe Navarro
Yeah. I’m on the road all the time and I’m giving presentations all over the world. You’re running – one day you’re in Germany, the next day you’re in Romania, then you’re back in Chicago, and then you’re on the West coast and you’re talking to people – and Beijing. You’re talking to people from all over the world. What’s interesting is is what seafarers found 400 – 500 years ago, that affability, having a smile.

One of the things that works really well and I encourage young business people to do this is don’t feel like you have to stand directly in front of another person. That in fact we tend to increase the amount of time we are with others if we will just slightly angle to them so that we’re not directly in front of them. We’re just at a slight angle to them. By angling, we increase what’s called face time. Obviously, for business, this is really critical is increasing face time.

I have found this works in every culture wherever I’ve been. Instead of just standing right in front of them, I – you greet them, you angle to the side and there’s a sense of harmony.

We have to remember that when the conquistadores arrived in the New World they saw the same behaviors here that they had seen in Queen Isabella’s court. The king had better clothing. He sat higher. He had an entourage. He couldn’t be touched, blah, blah, blah. Everything in Queen Isabella’s court.

These are universal things that are endearing, such as giving people the requisite amount of space. In fact, I just wrote an article about that for Psychology Today because I go around asking folks “How far away do you like people to stand near you?” It’s kind of shocking to listen to what they say. It’s always greater than where people are standing next to them.

They say, “You know three to four feet,” and some people want even more. Be sensitive to the spatial needs of other people, that some people just don’t like others to be too close.

Be yourself. Be natural. Not everybody’s going to be an alpha. There will always be omegas. There’s a place for everybody. But also, be mindful that if you have something important that you should be heard.

One of the things I notice a lot with, especially with young women coming into business is that often they sit rather demure at their seat. Then almost the meeting is over and they don’t have an opportunity to talk. Oftentimes, they’re not giving away the cues that say, “I have something important to say.”

Those things are instead of leaning back, leaning forward and in when you have something ready to say, making direct eye contact with the person that is either presently speaking or is the moderator to let them know, “Hey, I have something to say.”

The other one is not steepling. Steepling, and that’s where the fingertips are together, is the really the only universal sign that we have of confidence, that we’re confident about what we’re thinking or about to say. I think-

Pete Mockaitis
So we should not steeple?

Joe Navarro
No, we should when we have something important to say. You don’t want to do it all the time.

What I found in my studies was that oftentimes women will do it low on their lap or not very high. When in fact, they should do it so it’s visible so that it communicates to everybody this is important and I’m very confident at this moment.

Look at Angela Merkel, over in the UK – or in Germany, sorry. She steeples all the time, but then she is a – she has a doctorate in engineering and she is very confident. You see those behaviors. I used to see them also with Margaret Thatcher and others.

It’s a behavior you want to emulate. You want to use it at the right time and the right place, but you also need to communicate “I want to be heard.” Those are some I think good indicators there.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. Now tell me, Joe, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Joe Navarro
I think one of the important things about body language is that I continue to be a student of it. I’d like to one day be able to say yeah, I have the definitive expertise. I’m reluctant to do that because I’m learning things all the time. I’m observing things all the time.

I think it behooves us to learn this language that is so part of us as humans and it’s the primary way that we demonstrate love and empathy. That’s pretty important.

It’s also the way that we sense and detect danger. We’re at an ATM machine. We’re looking over our shoulder. It’s late at night. We’re looking for somebody sneaking up on us.

It’s the number one way that we choose our mates. We don’t ask for a resume. We look at them. We smell them. We touch them. We watch them and we make decisions based on nonverbal.

A lot of people think, “Well, is it really that important?” Well, I can’t think of anything more important than safety, child rearing, and mate selection. That pretty much hits it out of the park.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something that you find inspiring?

Joe Navarro
Yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes, and I know a lot of people will hear this who have been to my seminars, it’s – I’m going to paraphrase, but it comes to us from Carl Sagan, Carl Sagan the cosmologist, absolutely brilliant, taken from us at too early of an age. He said, “We’re really not who we think we are. But if you were to ask what are we. We’re the sum total of our influence on others.”

I think it’s very true. You, yourself, with your podcast, sharing knowledge, sharing ideas, that’s influential. I look at the people that have influenced me in life and I think what was it that was great about it? Could they build something? Could they do this? Yeah, we love people that are skilled with a craft, but we’re mostly influenced by those that are influential and they do that by how they live their lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Joe Navarro
One of my favorite ones came out a few months ago. It just goes to show how sensitive we humans are to the smallest of little details.

They grabbed somebody and they put a green sweater on him. They said, “Go out and ask for favors.” They did. Then they took the same person and they – on the sweater, they put the logo of a high-end clothing manufacturer. It was only a half-an-inch logo.

They sent him out to go and ask people for favors, like, “Can I use your phone? Can I park here? Can I come inside?” and all this stuff. The times when he wore the logo 52 – 53% of the people agreed to help out. When he didn’t wear the logo, only 13% would help out.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my gosh. Wow.

Joe Navarro
What does that tell – that tells social scientists – and I’ve done this experiment, interestingly enough, with people just wearing beach shoes, flip flops, ones that cost $1.99 and then ones that were from a famous manufacturer.

Pete Mockaitis
So they’re still flip flops, but just different – yeah.

Joe Navarro
They’re still … but different manufactures. Invariably in my non-scientific study, those that wore the nicer got better treatment.

What does that tell us that anthropologists and biologists would say look, we’re primates. We’re very sensitive to hierarchy and we’ll always be sensitive to hierarchy and the markers of well, who is the alpha, who’s the silverback and who is everybody else. We cannot escape that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Joe Navarro
My favorite writer is Steinbeck, so Grapes of Wrath.

But the one book that I return to over and over and over again is the Histories by Herodotus. It’s the only book that I’ve actually read six times. Here’s the father of history writing 2,500 years ago. He’s telling us about the world as it existed then. It’s just exquisite in its breadth.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Joe Navarro
Favorite habit, it has to be going out for a walk with my family at night. I love them dearly, my wife, my dog. I enjoy their company.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate? Folks retweet it. They quote it back to you often.

Joe Navarro
Yeah, there’s one in particular. I’m glad you asked that. I put it out there many, many years ago when I first started on Twitter. I didn’t know I would become that significant. It’s – someone told me that it may have been not necessarily borrowed, but it’s a variant of what somebody else had said. It probably is since there’s nothing new under the sun.

But basically what it says is that what we do in private when nobody is watching us is more important than when we’re in public and that when we help those who can do absolutely – can do nothing for us, that is the true measure of our humanity because there is no expectation of any kind of reward. For some reason that seemed to resonate with a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis
And Joe, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Joe Navarro
Very easily, my website, JNForensics.com. My books are at all the major retailers. Certainly they’re available on Amazon or they can come to your website.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm, sure thing.
Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks who are seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Joe Navarro
I do. Become better observers and you’ll become better humans. You cannot attend to others if you can’t observe them. I think most of us know how to look, but very few of us know how to observe.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Joe, this has been such a treat. Thank you for taking this time and good luck with The Dictionary of Body Language and all that you’re up to here.

Joe Navarro
Well, thank you Pete. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be on your show.

Aug 29
0

339: Achieving Hyperfocus with Chris Bailey

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Chris Bailey: "The state of our attention determines the state of our life."

Chris Bailey looks into how distraction affects productivity and the many ways you can prevent yourself from getting distracted ahead of time.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Ways to hack your procrastination triggers
  2. How much time we waste on checking emails
  3. The 20-second rule and three ways to apply it to your  distractions

About Chris

Chris Bailey is a productivity expert, and the international bestselling author of The Productivity Project, which has been published in eleven languages. His next book, Hyperfocus, came out yesterday. Chris writes about productivity at Alifeofproductivity.com, and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive, without hating the process.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Chris Bailey Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome back to the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Chris Bailey
It’s been a while. It’s been like 250 episodes or something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s nuts, yes. I was just thinking about it like your episode before number 32 is like under a tenth of the current episode number. So how about that?

Chris Bailey
Yeah. Do you ever go back and listen to the first few shows and how – do you think you’ve improved a lot since then or do you even want to listen to yourself back then?

Pete Mockaitis
I have listened a little bit, but not a ton. I’ve definitely noticed the difference. I’ve had a couple of guests who’ve been on multiple times and they have said similarly, “You’re better at this now,” which is good. That’s what you’re hoping for.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. I don’t remember you being bad at it But it’s good.

I’ve always liked looking back on my previous work and hating it because if you can find things to dislike in the way that you worked before, I think you’re on a positive trajectory. It’s when you look at your previous work and you think, “Man, where did I go wrong? Where did I lose my mojo? What’s different now in my work?” I think that’s when you run into problems. May you always look back at work and thinks it’s crap.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s like an Irish blessing. Well, thank you, lad.

Chris Bailey
Yes, you’re welcome, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I understand you recently got into knitting. What is the story here?

Chris Bailey
Who told you this?

Pete Mockaitis
I think you disclosed it on a form that I ask you to fill out, while scheduling this.

Chris Bailey
I didn’t know this would be made public, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe it was one of your people. You’ve got people now. You’ve grown a lot too.

Chris Bailey
Oh man, yeah. Since episode 30, man, I’m a changed man. No, I’m the same weird person. Knitting is this weird hobby that I think more people would enjoy doing if only they got in the door and tried it out a little bit.

A while back on a total whim, I signed up for a local course here in the small town Canada city that I live in. I this expect it to stick. There’s a piano – I’m looking at it on my left here. It has a bit of dust on it that’s accumulated in my office. I have a lot of things I guess that are kind of fleeting, that evaporate as quickly as they came, but knitting very much is one of my new favorite hobbies.

The benefits of this have been well documented. For example, it distracts you from pain. It leads you to remember more. It even combats things like depression. It lowers your resting heart rate. I’ve been looking at a lot of knitting studies lately in case you can’t hear that.

But those are benefits, but I actually knit to become more productive because it lets me just kind of rest my attention a bit. We can get to this a bit later, talk about this in the book, but it’s when we rest our attention that we become the most creative.

It’s when we focus on something with intensity that we become productive, but it’s in that resting state, especially when we get into that deliberately, that we are able to connect ideas together and plan and rest and recharge.

It’s great as a work break. I knit on planes. I knit on the couch while I’m working. I’m not knitting right now because I don’t have enough attention to spare, but yeah, I was knitting at the coffee shop this morning, drinking my morning tea and ignoring the way people were looking at what I was doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s so funny you say coffee shop because I remember one time I was on a date, this was some years ago, when I was single.

Chris Bailey
You know a date is going bad when they break out the knitting needles and start knitting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, she wasn’t knitting, but there was a dude like very close to us knitting and it was funny because he was maybe only four feet away or less. He just, he had his headphones on. He was sipping the coffee and he was knitting. He was like into it. It was clear that he was jamming, he was knitting, and this was the place that he was going to be doing it.

It was kind of funny because in a way I was like, “How odd,” but in other ways that’s pretty cool that you have so much confidence and self-assurance that you can peacefully knit in a public place and be cool with yourself.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah. It takes another level of either confidence or not really caring. One of the two or maybe they’re the same thing. I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, I just recently learned about knitting in terms of the research behind it from a recent guest, Dr. Srini Pillay. He mentioned that’s one of the top things you can do to enter a place of letting your attention rest and yet be somewhat engaged, like right up there with tending to a plant is knitting. Now I know.

That is what I thought like, Chris Bailey, Mr. Productivity experimenter, knitting is probably down with the research and sure enough you are.

Chris Bailey
Oh yeah. It’s in doing something that’s a habit too. This is one of the fun parts about writing a book about attention is when we do something simple that’s habitual, like when we take a shower, when we swim laps, when we just have our morning coffee, with just having the coffee and not listening to something or doing something else, this is when we’ve been shown to have the most – the greatest number of creative insights.

Because we have something habitual that anchors our attention to what we’re doing, that kind of guides us along – knit, pearl, knit, pearl, pearl stitch, knit stich, but – and it’s fun, so it anchors our attention, but it doesn’t consume our full attention at the same time, so we’re able to let our mind wander around to things like ideas and plans for the future.

Our mind has been shown to wander. It has this perspective bias that’s built into it, where when we just let our mind be – if you let your mind be in the shower tomorrow morning or maybe you’re listening to this in the shower in which case, hello – if you just let it be, you wander to think about the future 48% of the time, so about half of the time you’re thinking about the future when you’re letting your mind rest.

People think, “Man, I’m not focusing on anything. I’m so unproductive right now.” But you are productive because you can choose what you do after you let your mind wander. You can set intentions. This lets you shut off autopilot mode to work more deliberately and actually consider your goals before you act instead of just acting on this autopilot mode.

It’s one of those counterintuitive insights where sometimes the best thing we can do to manage our attention is just to not focus on anything at all and let our attention be.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I dig it. I dig it. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
Can you dig it?

Pete Mockaitis
I am. I am in fact digging it.

Chris Bailey
You’re digging it. Okay, that’s good to hear that you’re digging it.

Pete Mockaitis
That stat there – 42% or 48%?

Chris Bailey
48%. Our mind wanders to the – I’m going to try and get these numbers right. I might be off by 2%, might be transposing the numbers in my mind, but the future is 48%, it’s half. We also wander to consider the circumstances of the present 28% of the time. The past, only 12% of the time.

We think we only reminisce on the negative, and that’s true, when we go through a personal challenge, that number rises above 12%. But on average we think about the past 12% of the time.

This is why we come up with so many beautiful light bulb eureka insights in this mode when we let our attention scatter. Those numbers don’t add up to 100% and there’s – but the rest is when we’re thinking of ideas that we’ve collected. That’s when we connect all three to come up with beautiful creative insights that make us more productive overall because it lets us work in a more strategic direction.

There’s these kind of these two modes that we have over the course of the day. There’s the focused mode, but there’s the unfocused mode. The two modes are even anti-correlated with one another in our mind. They really complement one another in these ways, where when we’re focusing, we’re doing something productive, but when we’re letting our attention rest, we can choose what to focus on in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool.

Chris Bailey
It’s fascinating, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then you mentioned your book a couple times, Hyperfocus, sort of what’s the main-

Chris Bailey
Low-key plug.

Pete Mockaitis
-message of Hyperfocus all about?

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I like the realm of productivity, but not productivity in a cold corporate sense, but productivity in a sense of just accomplishing more of what’s meaningful and what’s important every day.

There’s a lot of books on time management out. I think there’s more than enough. That market has been long saturated. But I don’t think there are enough books about attention management. Maybe more specifically, the science behind how we should manage our attention.

I noticed this in myself after I wrote the last book that we were chatting about way back when on episode 30-something, The Productivity Project. I noticed that once I had finished that book, I had fewer deadlines in my work right after shipping that project. I was waiting for feedback and I stayed busy, but my work kind of expanded to fit how much time I had available for it. It was kind of Parkinson’s Law in action.

I realized I was tending to a lot of distractions, even though I was giving a lot of people advice that they should tame the distractions in their work. I noticed I was tending to social media more often. I noticed that I couldn’t focus as well as I could have before that book.

I thought if I have this problem as somebody who calls themselves a quote/unquote productivity expert, that’s kind of – it’s a tangent, but I don’t really think anyone’s an expert. I think we just – we’re constantly discovering more questions about things. But if I have this problem, then maybe other people do to.

Maybe the advice that’s out there that we should just tame distractions and become less busy and more focused, maybe that sounds good on the surface, but it doesn’t actually work in practice. That’s really what kicked off this project.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Then when it comes to what does work in practice, I guess there’s so many different ways we can slice and dice and present it, but let’s hear it. What are some of your top practices?

Chris Bailey
Oh man, there are so many of them. But I think where’s it’s maybe a good place to start is in how we focus to begin with because our focus has natural rhythms to it the research shows. It’s actually quite simple on the surface. I’ll say the rhythm and you’ll think, “Yeah, that’s obvious.”

But how we focus is we focus on something, our attention gets distracted, either by something external to us or something internal to us. We find ourselves in a daydream that’s unintended and not one we purposefully enter into when we’re knitting or taking a shower. Then once our attention gets distracted, something internal or external comes along, we bring it back.

I think it’s possible to map on top of this natural structure a way by which we can focus better. I think there are four steps that one should follow in order to focus deeper.

First we should choose what to focus on. This is something we don’t do often enough is set intentions for what we want to accomplish. I think there are moments of the day when we have a deliberate focus, when we choose something to focus on, then we focus on that thing.

Then there are the moments when we’re on autopilot mode so there’s no intention behind our actions, where our email inbox becomes our to-do list. We use our phone bouncing around between the same five or six different apps for a few minutes before getting out of bed. There are no gaps in our calendar. Notifications run our life. We kind of go through the motions of the day.

I think our productivity and the quality of our attention is partly proportional to what percent of the day we act with intentionality behind what we’re doing. I think this is an essential first step of focus is in any moment, we’re either focusing on something with deliberate focus, deliberate intention or we’re just on autopilot mode.

Because there are an infinite number of things that we can focus on at any given moment that makes doing this more essential than it ever has been because we have things that vie for your attention.

One thing that is missed in a lot of research on attention and the advice a lot of people give is that it’s not our fault that we can’t focus on what’s important. It’s just the way that our mind is wired. Our attention is fascinating in this regard.

We’re wired to pay attention to anything that has one of three characteristics. We’re wired to pay attention to anything that is pleasurable, anything that is threatening, and anything we find novel. There’s even a novelty bias that is embedded within the prefrontal cortex in our brain, the logical part off our brain, where we release dopamine for every new novel thing we focus on.

This is why it’s so easy to lay down in bed for half an hour bouncing around between the same loop of apps because nothing in our life is more pleasurable or threatening or novel than our phone, so we pay attention to that instead of the day, instead of things that are more meaningful and productive.

I think the first step, choose what we focus, tame distractions after that, focus on that thing, and then bring our attention back to that thing, but, yeah, I don’t want to go on for too long about these four things because then it turns into a monologue and not a podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. That’s really intriguing.

Chris Bailey
I’m fired up. I got to check myself every once in a while.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious when it comes to things which are pleasurable, threatening, and novel, it seems like there could be some nifty approaches that might enable you to trick yourself into finding the task that you quote should be doing in the moment to be one that is more pleasurable, threatening, and novel. Do you have any tips on that?

Chris Bailey
Oh yeah, we can reward ourselves for focusing on certain things. This is I think why taming distractions, why we need to get so ahead of that impulse because in the moment – what we see as a distraction is just an object of attention that is sexier than what we truly want to be doing.

If you’re listening to this podcast, for example, and you have your phone with you and you saw that somebody tagged you in a picture on Facebook, you might pause the podcast and maybe check out the picture and the comments that people left about you or focus on that instead of the podcast. The podcast might present you with more meaning potentially, maybe more productivity later on, but it’s not the most pleasurable thing or novel thing.

I think that’s where to start with this stuff is to eliminate anything that could be more pleasurable, threatening or novel than what we truly want to be doing. This is the key because our attention will always gravitate to something that has any one of these three characteristics.

We look for threats in our environment. In reality, there are no saber tooth tigers encroaching on us building a fire, but the closest threats are maybe we’re with our significant other and we’re having  a nice meal, but CNN happens to be playing in the background, so our attention gravitates toward the red, threatening letters on the screen, the reason the CNN logo is red.

We have to eliminate these things ahead of time. But like you said, it’s possible to kind of trick ourselves into not putting off the things that are important as well.

A little side note on that. My mind is sometimes full of – my mind is like a Medeley database. It’s just full of a lot of studies that I can type a little search query into. One of those studies was conducted by … from Carlton University in Ottawa. Good Canadian, like-

Pete Mockaitis
Eh?

Chris Bailey
-yours truly. Eh, bud. He’s a really good Canadian chap and He found that there are certain attributes that a task or project can have that make us more likely to procrastinate on it. Those are whether something is boring, whether it’s frustrating, whether it’s difficult, whether it’s ambiguous, whether it’s unstructured, whether it’s lacking in personal meaning, or whether it’s lacking in intrinsic reward.
Our most important work usually has several of these and that’s why we hopefully get paid more than minimum wage to do it. The most productive things on your list, the most consequential things, they’re probably not pleasurable or threatening or novel, or as pleasurable or threatening or novel as Facebook or email notification.

We can kind of hack those procrastination triggers to make things more threatening. We can make them more threatening by working with somebody to set a deadline, maybe our boss. We can make it more pleasurable by rewarding ourselves for following through on something. We can make it more novel by maybe setting an artificial deadline.

Instead of saying, “I’m going to work on this report for the rest of the afternoon,” we can say, “I’m going to set a timer for 35 minutes because that’s how long I think I can focus on this thing for and I’m not going to allow myself to work on it past that point.” You work on it for 35 minutes. You get hyper-focused on that task and it’s kind of a shortcut to make it more threatening and novel and pleasurable at the same time.

Yeah, I love that line of thinking that there are things we can do in order to tame these things ahead of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’m thinking about the novel perspective in terms of you could do it in a different location. It’s like a Dr. Seuss book. It’s like you could do it with a mouse. You could do it in a house.
Okay, cool. That’s handy there. I want to talk a little bit about the natural rhythm in terms of you’ll focus and then you’ll stop focusing. You’ve actually spelled out some timeframes, amounts of time associated with focus and then breaking. How do those times line up?

Chris Bailey
Well, the rhythm that we work in today is very choppy. It’s very chopped up. One of the most alarming statistics – I don’t really find statistics that powerful because you need to map several of them together to really create a picture of how we work because you can never really rely too much on one study, so you have to kind of take them as a painting as a whole and each one of them is a bit of a brush stroke that creates that final vision of the way things are.

The one stat I think that shines brighter above all the others is one that looked at how long we focus on just one thing for in our work before we switch to doing something else. The thing I love about this line of research – this was an institute study. They didn’t bring a mouse into a lab and find that the mouse could only focus on drinking water for five seconds.

They looked at people in an actual workplace and they had logs on their computers. They set up cameras to look at how people focused throughout the day. They did well at first, but then they kind of settled into their natural rhythms.

What the researchers found, what Gloria Mark and I think Mary Czerwinski found, was that on average when we have – when we’re doing work in front of a computer, we only focus on one thing for 40 seconds before we switch to doing something else. This kind of shocked me in a way that I find difficult to explain because once you observe this pattern in the way that you work, it’s difficult to go back to working the same way again.

You look at the cost of constantly switching. There’s a difference between multitasking and rapid task switching I found in looking at the research. Multitasking is doing a few things concurrently, which we can do with habits and things like that.

But when we switch rapidly between things, when we go from checking email to working on a report to looking at Instagram to Facebook to a conversation, our tasks have been shown to take about 50% longer compared to when we do one thing from start through completion.

The reason for this is there is a certain attentional residue that remains in our mind that are fragments from the previous task that we were just focusing on. It’s impossible to go from, for example, having this conversation to checking your email, for an example, because there are certain fragments of this conversation that remain as an aftertaste in your mind.

Because of this, the longer we work on one thing for, the more productive we become because we don’t have that residue that we’re trying to clear as we switch to something else. Because of this, we feel like we’re multitasking, but really we’re just remembering a little bit of the previous tasks that we were doing as we try to focus on a new one.

This is the rhythm by which we operate for so much of the day. We feel busy – I found this in myself. If I sound like I’m kind of chastising people for working this way, I found this in myself, which was the sad part to admit, especially as somebody who considers himself or is often called the productivity expert.

But I notice this in myself that I felt busy, but that I wasn’t accomplishing as much as when I just focused on something for an extended period of time and tamed distractions before getting into that.

When we get off track completely, this is when our productivity really falters. When we get distracted or interrupted completely, whether this is an external distraction or an internal distraction, it takes about 25 minutes to get back on track and resume working on the original task. And we work on 2.5 other tasks on average before we resume that first task.

We fare a bit better when we’re interrupted externally versus internally like our mind wanders or we seek something that’s pleasurable or novel. But this is the rhythm by which we work when we don’t manage our attention deliberately. We’re productive enough to keep up with our deadlines, but we don’t work up to our potential and we don’t feel as rested as we could if we deliberately scattered our attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
A couple things. That 40 seconds, it’s almost hard for me to believe that is true. Could you maybe paint a picture of what that looks like there?

Chris Bailey
Yeah, it’s actually 35 seconds in a lot of cases when we have IM conversations open. When we have apps like – 40 seconds is kind of a nicer finding from the study. I actually found it hard to believe. This study was done by a team of researchers at Microsoft of all places. It was done by Gloria Mark, Mary Czerwinski. I didn’t really believe this myself, so I flew out to Microsoft to ask them about it.

Microsoft, it turns out, has thousands of people who conduct research for research’s sake because I guess Bill Gates believed in doing that I guess, which is nice. It gives us nice insights like this, but this was the rhythm that people worked in when they were doing work on a computer.

It measured kind of the context switching. We switch between windows on our computer a lot, but we switch between different projects more often. This was the switching between projects in that digital context mainly. But yeah, we fare even worse when we have things like IM open in the background. It’s a fascinating rhythm and it’s something that’s worth observing in yourself.

We fare a bit better when we’re in certain tasks above others. For example, having a conversation with somebody, in that context, keep in mind this is a mainly digital context, so if we’re having a conversation with somebody, for example, Pete, you and I were grabbing a coffee. I didn’t bring my knitting needles because the conversation is pretty good, but maybe I’ll keep them in my bag in case there’s kind of a lull and we can’t find things to talk about.

But let’s say one of us leaves our phone on the table. We flip it down so as to be respectful to the other person. Another one of my favorite studies that I encountered in writing Hyperfocus was it looked at coffee shop patrons who brought their phone with them to the coffee shop and flipped it face down on the table.

What they found was that on average, these people checked that phone every three to five minutes. People thought they were investing in the relationship, but still there was that constant switching and that attentional residue from that digital world that prevents us from becoming close with the person ….

They found that the phone on the table interfered with their closeness, connection, even relationship quality. Fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
In short the 40 second thing, you’ve seen it within yourself. You saw it at Microsoft and you absolutely buy that it’s for real.

Chris Bailey
I do in a digital context with that caveat. When we’re having a conversation, it would fare a bit better, but when we’re working in front of a computer, especially when our phone is nearby and especially when we have IM windows open and things like that, we switch contexts more often than we think we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s wild. Okay, so that’s kind of the pace there. What would be an optimal pace? If that’s sort of the standard of what is occurring, what would be ideal?

Chris Bailey
Yeah. It’s a fair question, but the answer is it depends on the type of work that we do. This was something that – I went into writing this book thinking, “Okay, everybody should just focus all day. We should – the longer we can focus for on one sitting, the deeper we’re able to work, the more productive we become and the more we end up accomplishing.”

But there are two types of work that we do over the course of the day. There’s the focus work that we do. For example, a novelist would spend most of their day hunkering down, writing a book. Maybe if they could tame all distractions, leave their phone in another room, have no internet, write it on the typewriter, they could be optimally productive when they cut off the outside world.

On the other side of that focus spectrum, there’s the collaborative and in some cases the hyper-collaborative work that we do. An example of something hyper-collaborative, we’ve all seen the picture of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of Defense, and all those people during the Osama Bin Laden raid.

If everybody in that picture had noise-cancelling headphones on and they were hyper-focusing on that thing and not talking to anybody and … off from external distractions, things may not have gone as well as they did after that picture was taken.

We need to think with the … that are on our plate, where we are on that spectrum. Because if we’re doing something that’s collaborative or even hyper-collaborative, we sometimes need distractions. Often distractions and interruptions are relevant … that we’re currently working on.

But on average we have about 9 to 11 projects that we have on the go at any one time, so the odds that an interruption or a distraction like an email notification relate to what we’re currently doing are in fact pretty low. I think that’s where we have to start with, where we have to think, “Okay, what’s the focus work that I have to do today?” I love playing blocks of time on my calendar where I hyper-focus on these tasks where I’m not available.

But then you have the collaborative things where sometimes it’s good to be interrupted because that’s – collaboration is a process of continuous interruption. We need information from other people. They need information from us, so by interrupting, we can get that information.

It’s fragmented by default in a good way because even though we might not become more productive individually, we become more productive as a system, as a collective group with our team or with whomever we’re working on a project with. I think that’s … start.

Depending on the breakdown of the work we do, we can go from that point to work backward to how much time we should be focusing, hyper-focusing and not.

Pete Mockaitis
It kind of reminds me of the makers versus managers in some of the lean startup-y stuff suggesting that makers, the people who created stuff and produced bodies of work with their intellect, whether they’re coding or designing or writing or editing a podcast or something, need more uninterrupted spaces versus the managers need less of that because they’re more about just kind of look quickly, giving and receiving information that people need to have so that everyone’s coordinated and doing the right stuff.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah. Totally, yeah. One meeting in the schedule of a maker – if somebody’s a coder and somebody schedules a meeting with her like three in the afternoon, that’s going to disrupt that coder’s entire afternoon and maybe even their entire day because that’s kind of a bit of tension in the back of their mind that they have to dedicate toward that one thing.

I think that was one thing that surprised me. I think this speaks to the benefit of experimenting with the research because a lot of the things that sound good on the surface like, “Oh, we should tame every single distraction we face in our work,” don’t really prove to be true when you actually try them on for size.

It speaks to the value of road testing these ideas, but it also speaks to the value of adapting what works for us and leaving the rest because it’s personal … because of that, the advice is personal. We should take what works for us I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. One thing I wanted to dig into in terms of speaking about what works for us is you have a suggestion that we should take a break before we need it, before you’re feeling exhausted, fatigued, bogged down. I’m curious to hear if you have any sort of guidelines in terms of minutes of focus that that is in terms of a range.

For me, what I find, this is been a pattern in the mornings I’ve noticed. It’s like, “Okay, I’m cruising, I’m enjoying it, it’s fun, I’m getting ideas, I’m making connections, I’m flowing and rocking and rolling.” I just sort of go, go, go. Afterwards I go, “Oh man.” It’s sort of like I don’t know when should I say, “I know you’re having fun and enjoying this and being productive, but nonetheless, it would be optimal to stop right now.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, stop right now, thank you very much. Yeah, when you’re in the zone – here’s the interesting thing about breaks is the more often we have to regulate our behavior, the greater number of breaks we’ll need.

Sometimes people turn to productivity advice for the wrong reason. They hate their job for example, and … find the motivation to do it, so they think, “Okay, maybe … will help.”

If you have to regulate your behavior – and we all have to stuff we don’t want to do, but if your whole day is stuff you don’t want to do, then you’re going to … breaks, because you have to regulate your behavior and more specifically your attention to focus on stuff, pay attention to stuff, to pay attention to conversations, to get stuff done because it isn’t pleasurable or novel enough.

I would start by that point – at that point. The more you need to regulate your behavior, the greater number of breaks that you’ll need.

I would kind of develop a mindfulness, not on a specific number per se. I was looking for the optimal number and there’s been some interesting studies on breaks. I think one study looked at the optimal number of breaks that we need to take to be optimally productive over the course of the day.

I think they found something like for every 57 minutes we work, we need to take a 13 or a 20 minute break or something along those lines. A number that essentially equals out to one and a half hour break for eight hours of work over the course of the day.

But it really depends and this is the tough part about giving advice. I think a reason why this is – what I learned in the process of writing this book – a reason why we should blanket – we should question all the blanket productivity advice that people give. Question the advice that I’m giving. Question the advice that all of the experts on this show are giving.

Question the advice that especially when it’s blanket productivity advice that everybody should do things a certain way because if you love your work more, you’re going to need fewer breaks. If you … your job and you have to – or you hate a – let’s make things a bit less dark.

Maybe you hate a project that you’re in the middle of and you’re slogging through it and you find you definitely need to tame distractions to eliminate anything that’s potentially more attractive at the moment than what you really want to be doing, then you’re going to need more breaks and you should reward yourself because you’re going to need to recharge your attention more often.

But I think as a general rule we need a one hour break in the middle of the day to divide things up and as well as a couple 15 minute breaks here and there, where we don’t focus on social media, but we give our brain an actual rest.

This is … people make when they take a break is when we take a break we need to rest our attention. We need to let our mind wander because that’s how it recharges because by doing so we don’t need to regulate our focus.

When we just switch to tending to our smartphone instead of leaving that behind and going for a quick walk through nature to the coffee shop, it’s just focusing on something else and then moving our mind to focus on something else, and then moving our mind to focus on something else back to work and we feel like, “Uh, okay, I can’t really take this on. I’m just going to look at email for a bit.” And … do.

Find something that’s …, that doesn’t consume your full attention so you get the benefits of doing something habitual that let’s your mind wander and lets you ideate and plan for the future but still rest up a little bit too.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it, thank you. I also liked the study you referenced that revealed that email can consume much more of our attention than it does actual hard minutes of time. Unpack this one for us.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, like meetings are kind of the opposite of this idea, eh? A meeting might take up an hour of – I just dropped an eh, inadvertently Canadian. That would be – if I were to publish a memoir, Inadvertently Canadian would be the title I think.

The research on meetings, we don’t bring a lot of attention to them, but they soak up an incredible amount of time, but email is kind of the opposite. On average, I have the stats in front of me. This isn’t in my mind, so I have to tell you that I’m cheating.

On average we spend about 35 minutes on email each day, but on average we also check it 11 times every single hour, which adds up to 88 times over the course of the day.

This speaks to that 40-second study, email being just one of the things that we switch away from our work to, where we focus on something and the way we work from afar looks kind of odd. If an alien were to come down and look at you working or even just a researcher from Microsoft sets up a camera in your office and in a non-creepy way hopefully. Hopefully they tell you.

But they would find that you go from doing something totally productive, you’re in an Excel sheet, you’re typing up your team’s budget to checking your email another time. Or you’re listening at a conference call and you’re contributing, but then there’s a little lull in it where you don’t need to and so you pick up your phone and stop focusing on that and check your email on your phone. It kind of speaks to that idea.

Email is one of those things that we need to tame ahead of time. One study that is fascinating I think and speaks to this, the fragmented attention that we have, is 70% of emails are opened within the first six seconds that they’re received.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my gosh, really?

Chris Bailey
I notice this in my newsletter stats. I send out a newsletter whenever I publish something. You can see how quickly people open it. It really is opened pretty quickly.

But we can get ahead of this a little bit by hyper-focusing on email, not keeping it open all the time, but maybe setting – say you deal with an incredible volume of email, perhaps setting a 20 minute timer at the start of each hour and during that time you blow through as many emails as you possibly can and then focus on something for the other 40 minutes that isn’t as time sensitive, so you can get out of that reactive mode.

At most, if an email is urgent, somebody has to wait 40 minutes for a response, which they have to do when you’re in a meeting anyway.

Limiting points of contact is another strategy that I think really helps us become a better custodian of our attention where we don’t need all our devices to light up when we receive an email from Amazon telling us that our order is shipping.

I realized this when I was beginning to write the book and pouring over this research, focusing on it, up until the point I had around 25,000 words of research notes. I was pouring through those. I realized an email, my office would be as bright as a Wal-Mart because my watch would light up, my iPad would light up, … would light up, all because I got a single email.

Deleting the email app off of your phone is one of those powerful things that you can do because it just frees up so much attention for focusing on better things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, I am pretty hard core about limiting notifications.

Chris Bailey
Oh good.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m right with you there. Now since you’ve been doing all the research, I love that I can just throw it out to you-

Chris Bailey
Most of the research. There’s probably a few things that are still-

Pete Mockaitis
Every bit of research under the sun, you’ve looked at, which we appreciate your efforts on our behalf.

Chris Bailey
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I was looking at a – from a SaneBox blog. I use SaneBox and I love them for the record. The McKenzie Global Institute found the average employee spends about 2.5 hours a day reading and responding to emails. That’s way more than 35 minutes.

Are you – do we know what the mismatch is there? Is it due to much of the time is just looking at it, like, “Oh hey, there it is,” as opposed to “Huh, I will thoughtfully reply to this now?”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, there would be different methodologies to studying this. Of course different samples. But the ones that I looked at looked at not time logs, but actual logs of, which said that this person was in Outlook for … seconds and then they switched to Excel for 5 minutes 3 seconds. It’s kind of pretty granular the studies that I looked at.

But I would trust the McKenzie name. They definitely have that name. Sometimes a lot of these studies look at time logs that people create for themselves.

Do you know the sample? Maybe they were executives that had those more collaborative type roles, where managers do spend more time in meetings and emails because they play more of that traffic cop role.

It’s back to the maker and the manager idea where managers, another distraction – their day is a bit more distracted and they don’t benefit from these long extended periods of deep focus because they just don’t get them that often.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
I don’t know if that helps, but-

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it and I think I buy it in terms of if I just look at my actual sent messages on a given day, it’s like okay, well maybe I sent 20 messages and each of them are maybe 1 to 6 sentences on average. It’s like – well, I guess I didn’t have to think super hard to craft each of those. It may very well be perhaps 35 minutes, and yet, it can pop up – I try to minimize it because I know it has that novelty. It’s like, “Oh, what’s that? Let’s take a look.”

Chris Bailey
“Yeah, what’s that in the corner of the screen? Chris Bailey emailed me. That’s a new dish cloth he made.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s very pleasurable.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And sometimes threatening frankly.

Chris Bailey
Well dish cloths can be very – this – yeah, man I have more dish cloths than I know what to do with right now. One of things I’m thinking of doing, just as kind of a side note, is I do a lot of corporate talks and I’m thinking of this would be a cool thing to work into the talk. Talk about knitting and give out a dish cloth that I made for – maybe I’m speaking to McKenzie or something, give out a dish cloth that I made to someone in the audience. It could be fun.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s nice. Yeah. And they’ll clamor for it. “Who wants a dish cloth?” “Ahh!”

Chris Bailey
“I want a dish cloth. Oh my God.”

Pete Mockaitis
They’ll just go nuts.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, like a rock star. This is how I imagine it in my mind at least.

Pete Mockaitis
I also want to hear you have a 20-second rule, which I love, because I love the David Allen 2-minute rule. You’ve got a 20-second rule. What’s the rule here?

Chris Bailey
Yeah, so 20 seconds is a weird number in this way. The research shows that it’s about enough of a temporal distance that something ceases to become distracting or we can use it to bring positive distractions toward us.

I look around my office right now. My meditation cushion is to the right. There’s some nice plants around. There’s a piano to my left, which honestly I haven’t played in a while, so maybe it doesn’t work, but I found it works for other things.

But the idea is if … 20 seconds away, we’re a lot less likely to … into it. If we have a bag of chips that we keep in the basement in the corner in an area that we never go to, that’s a lot less appealing to us than if we keep it in the cupboard in the kitchen and it takes 20 seconds to go down there and fetch them. This is about enough of a temporal distance as something ceases to become a distraction.

We can keep positive distractions around us. I like to keep a lot of books – I have many books around my desk here because they’re a positive distraction. They’re not email. They’re not my phone. My phone is in another room right now. I just looked around to check to make sure I wasn’t lying. My phone’s in another room right now, so I need to leave my office and go to another room in the house. I’m working from home today – in order to fetch it. We can keep distractions that far away.

Another one of my favorite ways of doing this is I’ve relegated/delegated, whatever the hell the word is, I’ve made one device my distractions device. I’ve done this with my iPad. My iPad’s sole purpose is my distractions machine. I check my email, where I don’t have it on my phone and it’s very difficult for me to get to on the computer because my password’s so long.

That’s another use of the 20-second rule, where you keep your password so complicated and long that it takes you 20 seconds to remember and type them in or find them in a certain place. I do that. I use that as a distractions machine and I keep it in another room in the house. It’s … a costly investment. I think our attention is so valuable and that we easily earn that time back in how much more focused we are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. You could even just put your email program, if you have Outlook or Apple Mail underneath or within a folder or two and so it’s like, “Hey, that’s not just one click. You’re going to have to double click something and to double click something else and then open that thing up.” You may take more than 20 seconds to actually pull that off.

Chris Bailey
Or delete email. Or one of my favorite things to do because I get tempted by this even after looking at all of the other research, I get tempted by things like Twitter throughout the day when I’m not – when I don’t have a distractions blocker like Freedom or Cold Turkey or SelfControl enabled.

What I do is I purposefully make – I go to the site and I say change my password, and then I literally – I enter it, open a text document and bang on my keyboard until I have a series of letters and numbers. I paste that into each of the fields. I log out.

Then I need to go through the whole process to reset my password and do the double set verification. Did you make – are you the one who did this. Open up your email. Here’s the reset link. Verify that it’s you. That takes more than 20 seconds, a minute or two. But if I really need to get into Twitter, I’ll get into Twitter, but there will be a cost to doing so that’s at least 20 seconds long.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, Chris, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Chris Bailey
I want to give people something practical. I think we covered most of the stuff.

Honestly, I mentioned distraction blockers for a little bit. I always like giving people some tactical things to walk away with. I think download a distractions blocker while you’re in this mindset of taming distractions because this feeling will be fleeting. It’s easy to go back into working the same way that you did before.

If you’re on the go, open up your calendar app and schedule a little 15 minute block of time, download an app. Freedom is a great example of one. Cold Turkey is a great example of one. SelfControl is a great example of one. RescueTime is a great example of one. Some of these work across devices. Freedom being one of them. Download it and schedule a few blocks of time in your calendar that nobody will book you in that you can use to focus on just one thing at a time.

Tame distractions, enter into this mode, and have some fun with it. Whenever I enter into a distractions-free mode, I like to make a cup of coffee or go to a café if I’m – or maybe I’m on an airplane and I order something off the little menu. Have some fun. Have a coffee. Maybe listen to some music that you like that you find conducive to focus. Focus on what’s important.

You might feel some … at the start. If you do, ask yourself “Could I focus for an hour?” Maybe you say no. “Okay, well 45 minutes?” “Uh.” “30?” “Uh.” “25?” “Yeah, I could focus for 25 minutes,” and you focus for 25 minutes and you take a break and you go from there.

Be kind to yourself because, especially at first – I remember when I was first starting with these ideas in Hyperfocus, I couldn’t focus for a few minutes, but it’s a muscle that you build over time and now I can do it for a few hours just by using these ideas.

Maybe a couple tactical things to end with. Download a distractions blocker, schedule blocks of time in which you can focus and defend the time religiously because your attention is worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote?

Chris Bailey
I love – have you had Seth Godin on the show?

Pete Mockaitis
Not yet.

Chris Bailey
You should. My favorite quote is from him. He said “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” …

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite book?

Chris Bailey
Book? Probably – it’s a bit hippy bippy. If you get the book, keep that in mind. Again, question everything. But Mindfulness in Plain English. I forget the monk who wrote it, but it’s essentially a book on how to practice mindfulness and meditation. I found it to be so accessible and this is what got me into meditation and mindfulness in the first place. Maybe it will for you too.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Chris Bailey
Habit? I think the distractions-free mode is quickly becoming one of my favorites. Meditation is one of my favorites. Ordering copious amounts of pizza and drinking wine and watching Netflix is also – it’s not a habit, but it’s a nice ritual that kind of – it’s nice.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to do that immediately.

Chris Bailey
Yes. Yeah, if you’re listening to this-

Pete Mockaitis
You’re painting a picture for the end of the workday.

Chris Bailey
If you’re listening to this, forget about the podcast, forget about what we’re talking about, schedule a block of time in your calendar tonight in which you can binge watch Netflix and wine and Indian food or pizza, whatever your style is.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Do you have a final additional call to action for folks?

Chris Bailey
That’s my call to action. Honestly, your attention – the one thing that I learned from looking at hundreds – some people say they looked at hundreds of studies, I read like hundreds of studies front to back and I’m very convinced after doing so that people who say they’ve looked at all the research, haven’t because it’s difficult to read a study from front to back.

The final challenge I will give to you is to use this research to your advantage because if there’s one thing that I uncovered looking at it all it’s that the state of our attention determines the state of our life.

If our attention is overwhelmed in the moment, we’re going to be overwhelmed. If our attention is pulled in a thousand directions in the moment and we’re putting it in a thousand different places in the moment, we’re going to feel pulled in a thousand different directions and we’re going to feel overwhelmed in return.

But on the flip side, if you deliberately manage this ingredient that you have that makes you more creative, it makes you more productive, and you can bring more meaningful things to your attention to actually focus on them and savor them and appreciate them. I think these moment-to-moment things and experiences and events are what accumulate to, at the end of the day, create a life.

The more productive and meaningful and creative things that we focus on, the more productive and creative and meaningful our life becomes. Use this to your advantage. Pay attention to the research, but maybe more important than that, pay attention to what you have to do on a daily basis in order to make your life better because of it. Because it’s worth doing I found. That’s one thing I’d like to impart on you.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. Well, Chris, this has been a pleasure yet again. Please keep up the great work and congrats on all you’ve done with the book, Hyperfocus, and everything else.

Chris Bailey
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Aug 17
0

334: How to Stop Freaking Out and Keep Moving Forward with Maxie McCoy

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Maxie McCoy says: "If something is moving you forward... so much possibility is there."

Maxie McCoy advises dropping the grand plan of your life in favor of simpler questions to move you forward.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Two exercises for discerning your direction
  2. Why you should keep a gratitude journal
  3. Five wise questions to ask your support network

About Maxie

Maxie McCoy is a writer and speaker obsessed with giving women the tools they need to believe in themselves. She writes weekly inspiration on maxiemccoy.com, and is the host and executive producer of the live-audience show Let Her Speak. She specializes in creating meaningful offline experiences for top brands and conferences. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, Bustle, Fortune, TheSkimm, INC, Business Insider, Yahoo, Marie Claire, GlassDoor, The Huffington Post, Women’s Health and many others.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Maxie McCoy Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Maxie, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Maxie McCoy
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’ll get into a lot of really good stuff, and perhaps the best place to start is with your flower obsession. What’s the story here?

Maxie McCoy
You know, where all great podcasts start. So my flower obsession – I really just have this dream of myself in the future where I’m going to own a flower shop at the age of 80. But really where that came from is, I have a ritual every Saturday morning – I go to the farmers market here in San Francisco at the Ferry Building. We’ll get into rituals later, because it’s such a key piece of figuring out where we’re going. And I basically only allow myself a certain amount of cash and I spend it all on flowers. And then I come back and I fancy myself a flower designer and cover my one-bedroom apartment full of flowers. So it’s just flowers galore in here. I can’t really explain it, other than it’s a really fab ritual.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really fab, if I may. I don’t have much in the way of flowers; most days are flowerless in our home.

Maxie McCoy
Oh, no. We need to change that. It’ll bring your home alive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one thing I’ve noticed is that every time I pass eucalyptus branches, I go, “Ooh, I really like that!” And so, that seems like a nice little gateway drug, if you will, into bringing them into my home. But someone freaked me out, like, “You want to watch out for mold and for bugs.” It was like, “Uh-oh.” What should I do if I want to get eucalyptus into my life, in the home? Are there any safety tips I need to follow, or what’s the story?

Maxie McCoy
I really think that that’s amazing. First of all, I’m the girl that could kill a cactus. So if I can do it, I feel like you can do it and not have to worry about bugs. But isn’t eucalyptus the one that dries and then stays in a vase for a really long time?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what I thought.

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, you picked a really good one. And also, eucalyptus makes the air smell amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes! It’s so fresh and alive. It’s like, I’m a little bit more energized, and I love being more energized.

Maxie McCoy
See, and we’re going to talk about that too. So I think that you just need to follow the energy, Pete, and get yourself some eucalyptus.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, already unlocking transformation.

Maxie McCoy
Right here on the flower anecdote.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so with inspirations – you’ve got a lot of them written up at your website MaxieMcCoy.com. And I was sort of cruising through them and enjoying them. What would you say are some of the biggest recurring themes that show up again and again as you’re doing your writing?

Maxie McCoy
There’s a few of them, and I think in order to understand where they come from, it’s important to understand why I started writing to begin with. I actually was spending about 90% of my time on the road, talking to women, building out offline networking communities. So I was building out curriculum and facilitating workshops, and really just focused on having these conversations with young professional women. And there were just so many universal themes that kept coming up.

I was a writer first and writing has always been my first love. I was like, “I have to capture this somewhere”, because these conversations that we’re having in anywhere from groups of 10 to groups of 300 could be brought together for other people to glean from. And what really came out of that, and it’s what you see as you’re cruising around on my site, is this incessant doubt around our future. There are just a lot of these themes of, “Am I doing the right things? Is what I’m feeling normal? How do I handle this doubt? Where the heck am I going with my life?” And really the writings there are one giant love letter to women that they’re not alone, that we’re actually all feeling these things and asking these things, and most of it comes into career as a cornerstone in our life in my writings. So those are some of the big ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And so, our audience is mostly women, but not all. I’d say gentlemen too experience some of these questions – the “Where am I going with my life?” obsession, you call it. And so, your book, You’re Not Lost tackles this. And how would you phrase the main idea behind You’re Not Lost?

Maxie McCoy
You’re Not Lost came because in all those conversations I was referencing, it was the one thing – and I’m sure you have this with our podcast also – it’s the one thing that I just kept hearing over and over and over again. And it brought me to the main thesis and the solution that I was trying to create from having heard this so much. It’s just simply that you don’t have to know where you’re going in order to begin; that we can find our way when we tap into a really deep sense of self-belief in order to take small step after small step after small step.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I dig this. And I see that you on your site have a reference to Tara Mohr, and we’ve had her on the show, and she’s awesome. That’s one of the top, top downloaded episodes – fun fact – the Tara Mohr episode.

Maxie McCoy
It doesn’t surprise me. Just this morning actually I was sharing on Instagram about this visualization of  my future self, which I actually found from Tara. The amount of comments already this morning on that are just… She resonates so widely with me, with my audience also, and just that concept of some of what we want to figure out in our life, we can do by going forward first.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so, for the listener, that was the “inner mentor” exercise, where you imagine an older, wiser version of yourself in a pleasant setting, and just see what does your older, wiser self tell you. And it’s almost freaky. I was like, “Wow, that was really wise and helpful.”

Maxie McCoy
So, did you do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I just made that up. It’s like, “That’s all from me! Whoa!”

Maxie McCoy
“It all came from me.” Wait, I have to know – what was your inner mentor’s name? Because in the visualization exercise, for everybody listening, you have to name your future self. Do you remember what your name was?

Pete Mockaitis
We did it such a rapid pace; it was sort of real time on the show. And so I more just had a visual picture, as opposed to a name. I just thought of him as Peter.

Maxie McCoy
Yes. Kind of like Maxine.

Pete Mockaitis
And I more so resonated with his gray hairs and wrinkles, and yet sort of smiley, joyous demeanor. I was like, “Okay, what does this guy have to tell me?” [laugh]

Maxie McCoy
“Let’s talk about this guy.” Same. I had a very similar experience. It was cool, because kind of what you just said –  we have all of our answers. And a lot of the messaging that I work around is really to help people get to peeling back that onion and just figuring out our own answers. And this is one amazing exercise to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we got the, “I’m lost. What am I doing? Where am I going with my life?” – that obsession. You say one of the very first steps is to just accept it’s okay to start before you have the whole masterplan step by step laid out. So, what are some of the other first steps that folks should take when they’re wrestling with this one?

Maxie McCoy
I think when you are just kind of obsessed with that question, there’s a lot of people out there that are going to tell you to find your passion or figure out your purpose, which honestly – and I don’t want to offend anyone – I kind of think it’s B.S., because we’re all really smart people; if we knew the answer to that, we’d be doing it already. And so, it really is more of getting us into action, to a place that we’re going to be able to really level up the answer to some of those really big questions. And at a macro view kind of figuring out, “Where is my life going?” really is about dropping the obsession with the big picture and stepping into the unknown.

I am a reformed goal junkie and then some. I used to live my life by a masterplan, but there’s a number of things that happen when you do that. We’ve all been there, where we’ve achieved the goal, then feel completely empty about it, whether we’ve done that at work or whether we’ve done that in our own lives. We’ve set this bar for ourselves and we get there and it’s like, “Well, this doesn’t really feel like anything.”

Or we don’t have the ability to even conceptualize the masterplan. The feeling of loss comes from both of those, and just at a macro view, when we can tap into our own power and be willing to step into the unknown, we’re going to create the path as we go. That is what starts to open up the, “Oh, I actually do know where this is going.” But you’re not going to think your way to that answer.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that, I dig that. And I think sometimes people will identify a passion, like, “I love the violin! Oh, but that’s really not practical. You can’t make a career on the violin. Only a dozen people per town.” Whatever, it can go to a symphony. So, I’m intrigued by that. You say if you knew it, then you’d be set.

Maxie McCoy
You’d already be doing it, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking, sometimes you have some inklings, but it feels sort of impractical or not possible. So, what do you do with that one?

Maxie McCoy
You’re totally right, that there are some of these that can feel impossible. However, if something is moving you forward, actually so much possibility is there. I’d even say in my own life working in women’s leadership and talking to women for a living really… My background was sports broadcasting even though this was always my passion – really did always feel outlandish until some of the small decisions and choices that I made led me here.

And I think instrumentally these high-level, like being a pro athlete or a concert pianist – those things could absolutely be hard to achieve, and to make a life and to grow, but in the context of our own jobs, when we’re able to tap into that inkling and know it may not be about the fact that you love playing the violin and that’s where you want to make your living; it may just be that you want to be a bit more creative. You might be in a data job, but the violin is really speaking to you, and then really understanding why is that, what are the qualities about this that are pushing me forward? And I think when you start to tap into that energy and ask yourself, “Why?”… We’ve heard the exercise – I’m sure all of us – you ask yourself “Why” three times and it can really get at what that inkling might be able to tell you, even if it feels really not remotely possible. There’s some kind of nugget there.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So with the violin piece – when you go into some “Why’s”, let’s just see how this might work. You might be, “I love the idea of being able to be immersed in something for hours at a time without interruption, and feeling like I’m being pulled in 10 different directions from all these different stakeholders who want a piece of me.”

Maxie McCoy
And I ask you, “Okay, Pete. But why?”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. I don’t actually play the violin, so I’m trying to imagine a violin player.

Maxie McCoy
You want to know what’s funny? I do play the violin.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding! Maybe my subconscious picked that up as I was reading about you.

Maxie McCoy
It’s kind of incredible. It’s by my feet, which is amazing. That’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you tell me. So maybe the “Why” associated with that – I’m just going to guess – and then you give me another example. So, with the violin, “I like the sense of going deeply immersed into something and not be pulled in many directions, because I feel like I am getting a sense of learning and growth and mastery from getting to spend that extensive focus time.” And if I go “Why” again, it can be like… Or in some ways I almost feel like …, “Because that sensation is awesome, and I’d love it.”

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, and you’re feeling very alive or very energized. And it does come back to that sensation. I think what builds into so much of the joy that we have in our careers is like, “Where are we spending our time and the feelings that we’re getting out of that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. So, give us maybe another “three why” example that you’ve seen with some folks you’ve worked with.

Maxie McCoy
So I think that when you’re breaking down, whether it’s energy or expression, really figuring out who we are, is a really amazing first step in progressing this question along. I am always asking myself and others, “How can you be the highest possible expression of yourself? What does that actually look like?” And then when you are able to distill down what the expression of you looks like and ask yourself, “Why that matters, why that matters, why that matters”, you can really get at all of the molds and the limits that were keeping you from being that person.

And the reason I think that this is really important in the grand scheme of figuring your path out is, there’s so much telling us to be different and there’s so much telling us that we need to change before we begin, but actually we just need to take all of the things that people have told us to do differently and to be differently, flip it on its head, and you actually have an inverse formula, specifically for being the highest possible expression of who you are, which is going to directly correlate to the things that energize you. And I think when you can ask yourself “Why” three times, and doing this often, it really gets down into, “Why does it matter that I am the most me, and who does she or he actually look like in that?”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say “inverse formula”, can you talk a little bit more about that? What are we doing?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, so we’re basically converting all of the things people have told us to change and flipping it on its head. So if I’ve been told that I talk a lot, or that I’m loud, or that I’m taking up too much space – it’s really just flipping it and doing all of those things, and doing more of those things, of the things that come so innate into who we are, they make up who we are. And those become what an expression of us looks like, and not changing them, and not trying to fit into other people’s molds, because molds are just limits. They pull down on who we are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. And I think in some ways, you want to exercise a bit of prudence there, because on the one hand if someone says, “Pete, you’ve always got your head in the clouds. You’ve got to be more practical” – I can imagine inverting that like, “Coming up with new ideas and innovation is a real strength of mine. And so, I’m going to run with that and make it happen.” Versus if it was like, “Pete, you drink so much, you embarrass yourself and everybody else around you” – I’d rather not flip that, like, “This is who I am. Deal with it.”

Maxie McCoy
No, I think an asterisk is really important. You give a perfect example of where those things can really matter and where they cannot really be relevant to as much of a career conversation. But yeah, you’re totally spot-on. I think it’s more values and characteristics-driven as we’re trying to apply our talent into whatever it is that we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Alright, so those are some great steps to get the wheels turning in some really positive directions. I’m wondering, once you’ve begun, what do you do next?

Maxie McCoy
What do you do next? I’m really glad that you asked that. I think once the wheels are turning, there’s a couple of things and exercises that are just really powerful to get you to continue moving. We talked a little bit about going forward and talking to that future self, per Tara. But I think coming back to this “What energizes me” conversation, because that’s going to point you like a compass where it is that you should be stepping.

Reflecting here is really, really powerful. I think looking back at your work – if you’re in a place where you feel stuck or your feel a little bit unhappy or you’re feeling like you have no idea where you’re going – going backwards and asking yourself, “Where are all of the places that I’ve felt the most energized?” Energized can be a little amorphous, so I think breaking that down even further and asking yourself, “Where have I felt proud? Where have I done things where I’ve completely lost track of time?” We hear that one a lot. Where have you really felt deeply connected to your power? And just listing out whatever comes up, you’ll start to see that there are probably a lot of similarities in some of the types of work that you’re doing.

And then to put action around those, because that’s what actually matters. Just what you were saying, getting that wheel turning is not so much about creating the grand plan, but just asking yourself the simple question of, “What is the absolute smallest thing I can do right now to put any of that energy into motion?”

In my own life, one of the biggest life-changing things that’s ever happened to me came from a tiny, tiny decision. And a lot of what happens in our life isn’t because we took this giant big leap; it’s because we made one really small decision that ended up setting us off on a very exciting and different course, and we kept taking those steps and we kept taking those steps, but it started somewhere. For me that was about six and a half years ago. I’d been in sports broadcasting, I wasn’t yet in women’s leadership. I was feeling more lost than I had ever felt, and I was like, “Shoot. I have got to go back to the things that make me me, the things that I really care about.”

And I took myself actually through some of this, “Where have I felt the most proud and energized in my life?”, and it all came down to writing and women’s stories. So, I decided to sign up for a writing class. And it was a tiny decision at the time. It was just a difference of like, “Can I afford this 7-week class or not?” And I was like, “I’m just going to do it, because I need to be exercising this energy that makes me feel alive.”

And that ended up leading me directly to the startup that put me into women’s leadership, why I started being on the map, traveling and talking to women – because a woman in that writing class handed me the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle business section and was like, “Hey, there are these women who are building a company based on all the things that you care about.” And I think that’s what we underestimate, is we have no idea how it’s all going to play out. Life is so not linear, there’s just no way to tell these things. But if we can get into a place where we’re really willing to do that absolute smallest thing to follow the energy, it could truly lead us anywhere, and that’s where the path starts to open up.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I’d also like to get your take when it comes to the instincts and what they’re serving up. How do you think about doing the trusting of instincts, versus the digging deeper and exploring and evaluating what the instincts are pointing you to?

Maxie McCoy
I think it’s a fine balance of knowing, “Do I trust this? Is this just anxiety and fear coming up? Or do I need to go a little further, do I need to ask some people?” I think we can actually answer that ourselves when we come back to us. One of the things that I think we lose track of is how much time we’re spending in other people’s lives, which makes it really hard to evaluate any of those instincts, because we’re so not tapped into our own power.

These stats get referenced all the time, but the fact that a third of us feel unhappy and envious following our most recent social exchange – that just tells us that there is a direct correlation to how we’re feeling and how outside of ourselves we’re getting to even know what our instincts are saying, much less trusting them enough to do anything about it.

But I think with instincts specifically, this one’s a little off the map, but I love it so much and I’m on a crusade to bring back superstitions and lucky charms. Hold with me – it’s not as crazy as it sounds. When you are starting to get onto this path and you’re taking action and the fear shows up, and the gut instincts are showing up and you don’t know if this is right or if you should even follow it – there’s a lot that we can do to ritualize our highest potential.

So, doesn’t matter what this is. I can tell you what mine are, but there’s a reason that top athletes and people are using the sign of the cross a million times, or have their lucky underpants. There are so many examples of people doing this. And there was actually a study that found – they did this specifically with golfers – that when you hear, “I’ll cross my fingers for you”, or you’re given a lucky ball, they do better. They do better than those who didn’t hear those things or weren’t given a golf ball.

And so, we all have the power to kind of ritualize that experience. For me I have an Oprah candle that I light for myself before really big days. I also light it for other people. It’s this long candle that has Oprah’s face on it, because I’m obsessed with her.

Pete Mockaitis
Oprah gave you this candle? What is an Oprah candle?

Maxie McCoy
Oprah did not give me the candle. It just is an old devotional candle that has Oprah’s face on it. She’s my religious experience, but that’s beside the point. So, it’s become a joke now amongst me and all of my friends, like, “I’ll light the lucky Oprah candle for you.” And I light it for myself, and it’s not just superstition and lucky charms; it’s really proven to help our performance.

And so I think when you’re talking about, “I’m feeling this, I’m not trusting it” or, “I don’t trust myself”, there are some very real things we can do, like coming back to ourselves by getting out of the world of everyone else. And then, how can I use a lucky charm or a superstition to improve my performance? Which is going to feed back, loop cycle back to you feeling more confident and doing even more.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s really cool about the lucky charm or superstition or ritual piece is that whenever I go deep into scientific journal article reading, which is surprisingly often; I’m not a scientist.

Maxie McCoy
I’m not that surprised by that, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just curious and I want to know the truth. So I’ll get after it. One thing that really strikes me is how the placebo is really pretty good. It’s like when we compare something against the placebo, and they’re like, “Oh, it didn’t do any better than the placebo.” It’s like, “Yeah, but the placebo did pretty good on its own.”

Maxie McCoy
The placebo is pretty powerful, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe I should just sell placebos and look at all the results that get claimed. I don’t know, maybe FTC or somebody has cracked out on that. But I guess the placebo effect doesn’t really work unless you believe that there’s something that’s at work.

Maxie McCoy
Is being done, yeah. Do you have a lucky charm yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know about…

Maxie McCoy
No Oprah candles over there?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know if I’d call it a “lucky charm”, but I had a rosary that turned gold when I was in a pilgrimage location.

Maxie McCoy
No way!

Pete Mockaitis
Way, yeah. And actually it’s funny because a lot of people say this happens. So I was checking it every few hours when I was there. It’s in a tiny village in Bosnia. So that’s pretty cool, because it’s like something miraculous and supernatural happened here. And so, if there’s something really big happening, I do want that by me, because it’s like, “This got a heavenly touch and I’d like that to be near me in this moment.”

Maxie McCoy
It’s powerful. And I think knowing what those things are for you… I am so blown away by that story; that’s incredible. Yeah, I would keep it by you and in your pocket at all times.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fallen apart a few times. I’ve had to try to repair it, because it’s been around.

Maxie McCoy
Can I borrow it?

Pete Mockaitis
If you are next to me. While we’re in the same room you can have it in your pocket. So, whether it’s a lucky charm or an item from heaven, or a placebo – there’s something to that. I also want to get your take… On your website you have one of the most interesting hashtags that I’ve ever seen, and it’s #batshitgrateful. [laugh] I was like, “Boy, there’s a combination of words, and I think I love it.” So could you unpack a little bit of that? What does that mean?

Maxie McCoy
I absolutely can. I’m trying to remember the genesis of this particular hashtag, but I really think it just came from a place of being so grateful, #grateful was not enough for me. And people say “batshit crazy” often. I was like, “No, I’m not crazy. I’m grateful.” And then “batshit grateful” was born. And for me, kind of going back to that ritual conversation and the power of gratitude – I ended up ritualizing in my own life because things were just getting crazy and I was trying to find a way to ground back into myself so I could listen to take these little steps that were opening up on my own path.

People talk about gratitude journals all the time, and every year I felt like I was writing New Year’s resolutions, “This is the year that I’m starting the gratitude journal.” But it actually wasn’t until I read Oprah’s What I Know For Sure, which is one of my favorite books. And she talks about in her career, and at the height of her career, she was feeling a lot of unfulfillment in her own work. And when she looked at the reason for that, she brought it all down to the fact that she had stopped a gratitude journal that she had done for decades, because things were at the height, it was getting crazy. She had more than she’d ever had, and yet it wasn’t feeling like enough.

And I just had this light bulb moment of, “Okay, if Oprah felt like that then, then I sure as heck have to get my head wrapped around feeling grateful for what’s going on in my life right now.” And there is so much to back this up. One of the things that has always stuck with me about gratitude journaling is that if you do that for five minutes, it increases your long-term well-being by more than 10%. And 10% is the same impact as doubling your income. So you can feel the effects of doubling your income just by gratitude journaling for five minutes a day. And that really sums up the practice of being “batshit grateful”, but the hashtag as it is is just a way for me to just put out in the world that I am so grateful for where I’m at, even though I have a million places that I want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s cool about even just the concept of being “batshit grateful” is like being crazy – it’s sort of over the top. It may make people go, “Whoa”. Nonetheless, it really is wonderous that, whatever – you have delicious food available to eat, or that you can summon a Lyft or an Uber, they just snap up, from your phone you can contact anybody in the world and be in touch with them.

Maxie McCoy
You can have Pete’s voice on your phone any morning you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, so much to be grateful for.

Maxie McCoy
It really is so much.

Pete Mockaitis
My voice. And so, with the gratitude journal, could you unpack a little bit what happens in these five minutes? So you’re feeling grateful, you’ve got a pen and paper, and what are you doing?

Maxie McCoy
I think that you are just reflecting on your day. And when I say “I think”, I mean you’re reflecting on your day. You’re coming up with, no matter how bad your day was, no matter how good your day was, what are a few things? I always encourage to do three; two of those being, what are the things that you’re grateful for outside of yourself? So, what you just said – “I had a really amazing meal”, “I got to FaceTime with my best friend, who lives in another country.”

And then really taking that third, that last piece of the stuff that you’re jotting down and asking, “What am I grateful for myself for?” So whether that is, “I had a lot of motivation today and really got a lot done” or, “I feel like I handled that conversation really well” or, “I was really honest.” Just being able to be grateful to yourself, not just to the things happening to you. I do three. I jot down three and give a lot of detail. You could do five, if you wanted to do that every day. And it really is piecing out what are the things, no matter how simple, that you are feeling particularly grateful for that day.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice piece there. So when I’m doing gratitude stuff, it’s usually in prayer. I think of three to five-ish things that happened the last 24 hours. And I took that form Shawn Achor and his Happiness Advantage work – an amazing book.

Maxie McCoy
Amazing book.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I think of three to five things that I’m grateful for, just in general, that are generally great, like it’s pretty cool that I have a baby. But then you’re adding a whole another dimension there, in terms of grateful about yourself, because I think it’s quite easy to criticize. I see my shortcomings all the time.

Maxie McCoy
All the time. Our brain is wired for that. We’re kind of wired for criticism.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it could be, “I’m grateful that yesterday I was able to do four podcast interviews, even though I was feeling really hot and tired. And they were great.” So, that’s something to feel good about, in terms of what I could do there.

Maxie McCoy
Exactly. That’s exactly it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Maxie, tell me – anything else you want to cover before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, I think that we’ve talked a lot about this internal journey that we can have in order to kind of figure out where your life is going. But I think one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is how in certain situations, external validation from the people that we love the most and who are some of our biggest cheerleaders can really have an impact on us believing in ourselves enough to take these actions.

And so, the last thing that I would say, just in terms of what can make a really big impact in figuring out where it is you want to go – and this was one of the more transformational exercises I’ve ever done in my life – is really surveying. And we hear this a lot, about getting 360 degree feedback, doing peer reviews. There’s so much here on why this works, when it comes to our own self growth. But really figuring out where people see you and where they see your potential and your value, can eventually help you get there. You eventually will start to believe in yourself and the way that they see you and that they believe in you.

For me what I had done was, I had a friend who put together five questions. She sent them out in a typeform to around 15 to 20 of my closest, I call them “cheerleaders” – people who are your biggest fans and believe in you and have your best interests at heart. And we asked them what makes me irreplaceable, what is my superpower, what’s holding me back, where they thought I would be five years from now, and then anything else they wanted to say about my potential or my value or my talents.

And then that friend actually synthesized all the information to me and delivered it to me in person, and then gave me all the raw data. And I am telling you, Pete, my life – this was years ago – I am literally living the life that is in that spreadsheet of answers right now, because they saw it. I just was too scared to do anything about it, but knowing that these people believed in me and what they saw started to open up me being able to see what that North Star might be, and how to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool, that is bold. Can you lay it out – what are a few of those questions that got in there?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, the five are: What makes you irreplaceable? What’s your superpower? What’s holding you back? What are you up to five years from now? And then any additional notes on talents, potential, or unique value.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what I like is that it’s a positive. We had a guest talking about self-awareness – it was Tasha Eurich. Self-awareness and talking about doing dinner of truth. And that’s really cool.

Maxie McCoy
Super cool, but I don’t want to be there.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds pretty spooky, whereas those questions do have some constructive stuff – “What’s holding you back?”, to deal with. But most of it is going to make you feel awesome.

Maxie McCoy
And sometimes you need that. We’re hard enough on ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s cool. Well, thank you for that.

Maxie McCoy
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me now – how about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Maxie McCoy
I find this incredibly inspiring. You can tell me how you feel about this, but it’s from an artist named Ashley Longshore. She’s incredible, one of my favorite people to follow on Instagram. But she says, “Instant gratification will get you stone drunk or pregnant. Everything else is going to take some time.” I think it’s just a really funny way, and I say it to myself often to just have some patience with any of the things – with ourselves, with trying to figure all of this out. We’ve just got to stick at it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Maxie McCoy
The McKinsey study – I think this was late 2015 – specifically around advancing women’s equality, which is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, that $12 trillion could be added to the global GDP by 2025. And for me that’s just a reminder of why this work matters.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Maxie McCoy
Lilac Girls. So this one is Martha Hall Kelly. I read it, I’m obsessed with it. In all of this self-help work that we’re all always doing, I have transitioned my mind at night to being obsessed with fiction, and this is just one of my favorites. It’s got some complex female characters that I dig.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Maxie McCoy
So, I use and love – and this goes back to the gratitude journaling – an app called Reflectly. It’s a daily gratitude journal where you rate your day, and then you can see over the course of time what your metrics are, like how happy you’ve been over the course of a week, through the course of a month.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Maxie McCoy
Am I allowed to talk about the Oprah candle again? Because that’s just hands down my favorite habit. I light her every day. And by the way, I buy her in bulk.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect or resonate with your people, and you hear it quoted back to you frequently?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, this quote around, “You never know who you’re inspiring” gets retweeted all the time from me, because I think it’s just a reminder to all of us that our actions, even if they feel small and insignificant – our actions, our stories, our voice – it all really matters so much. You have no idea the impact you’re having on other people.

Pete Mockaitis
And Maxie, if folks want to get in touch or talk to you, where should they go?

Maxie McCoy
Please, I love talking to people. It’s MaxieMcCoy.com. You can email me directly at an inbox I do check, at hello@maxiemccoy.com. Or quickly, I’m always fast on social. It’s @maxiemccoy, Instagram and Twitter.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Maxie McCoy
I really think that everyone should do this survey about their humans, and just get that feedback and believe them. I also put the survey in my book, which is You’re Not Lost. It’s on any of the major retailers. You can find out a little bit more about the story and how to do that there.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Maxie, this has been a ton of fun.

Maxie McCoy
So fun!

Pete Mockaitis
Thanks so much for sharing your take, and good luck with the book You’re Not Lost, and all you’re doing!

Maxie McCoy
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m so batshit grateful to be here.

Aug 01
0

327: Unclog Your Brain through Unfocusing with Dr. Srini Pillay

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Dr. Srini Pillay says: "We do ourselves a disservice when we deplete our brains of energy with focus."

Dr. Srini Pillay shares why focus is over-rated and how unfocusing yields boosts to creativity and more.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The five disadvantages of focus
  2. How hobbies and whole days off re-energize your brain
  3. The types of thinking that activate your creative brain

About Srini

Dr. Srini Pillay is a globally recognized, Harvard-trained psychiatrist, brain imaging researcher and author of Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind. As CEO of NeuroBusiness Group, he works with non-profits and Fortune 500 companies globally to help people understand how to manage risk, uncertainty, and volatility, and to harness creativity. He is an in-demand keynote speaker and has been featured on CNN, Oprah Radio, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Forbes, and Fortune.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Dr. Srini Pillay Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Srini, thanks so much for joining us here on How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Srini Pillay
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you wear a lot of hats, and one of them that’s pretty interesting right now is you’re writing a musical. What is the story behind how you started with this and what’s it about?

Srini Pillay
The musical’s actually a love project of mine that I’m pretty serious about. My vision is to have it be on Broadway. I’m a trained musician, so I do have a background in music. And I had been studying jazz piano when all of a sudden I had the literal thought of wanting to find my voice. And I decided I wanted to exchange seats with my piano teacher and start singing improvisationally. And so I did. And one thing led to another, and all of a sudden I realized that there were all these things in my head that wanted to come out, that I was only churning out through planned processes.
And so I decided to just let a bunch of songs happen, and so composed the words and music to them. Last year I composed about 40 songs, and this year I’m going back into them, reworking them, and have fashioned what came out into a story that I think wanted to be told. And the title of the musical is Dance of the Psyche, and it’s about a young man’s existential plight and evolution through his adolescence and into his adulthood, recognizing that parsing everything into black and white is not always life’s best answer, that sometimes the gray is.
And there’s a definitive narrative that I don’t necessarily want to spoil, through which the music takes us. So, for me it was a love project as it incorporated not just my background in music, but because probably close to 50% of the musical is actually psychological construct singing, it gave me a lot of creative energy to think about human psychology and then to imagine what characters like Paradox or Anxiety might like to sing. So that’s the story behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy. Well, I think you have a hit on your hands. And if I could be so bold as to ask you to get a comp ticket before they cost $300, because I really want to see it. And what I’m thinking of right now is the movie Inside Out, which was a hit, and really was quite fascinating how they gave character and life to these emotions. Have you seen it? Did you enjoy Inside Out?

Srini Pillay
I didn’t see it. Everybody talked about it.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re going to love it.

Srini Pillay
Yeah. No, I’m excited and you’ve got that ticket.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m just getting a little bit more bold. While you’re on the spot, I’m just going to demand things from you. [laugh] If I could keep you on the spot for a bit, would it be too much to ask if you could sing one line for us, just to wet the appetite?

Srini Pillay
There are so many lines to think about. When Paradox introduces himself, he says, [singing] I am Paradox / the torture of contradiction. And this here is Clarity / my enemy.

Pete Mockaitis
“My enemy”. So there’s already a conflict, some tension to be worked through there. Well, thank you. Thanks for playing along.

Srini Pillay
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So now, tell us a little bit – your company is The NeuroBusiness Group. What do you do?

Srini Pillay
So NeuroBusiness Group essentially helps leaders improve both the quality of their lives and their productivity. And by “quality of life”, what I’m referring to is learning how to manage anxiety, how to manage uncertainty, how to make it through change processes and enhance creativity, while simultaneously always keeping an eye on productivity, to be able to reach their goals. So, what I do is, my background is in psychiatry and in brain science and executive coaching. So I combine my knowledge as a psychiatrist to understand human psychology, with executive coaching where I understand leadership development, together with brain research where I use brain-based paradigms to help people develop frameworks to create the behavior change that they want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. So you’ve already laid out a lot of relevant things that we love to know about here, as well as have some real research-based background and good stuff to add credibility to it. I’m so excited to dig into it. And so, you share a good bit of that wisdom in your book Tinker Dabble Doodle Try. And I have to ask, if the movie / book Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was an inspiration for the title at all, because it really rolls off the tongue well? There’s something appealing about the way those words go together; I don’t know what we call that.

Srini Pillay
Yes, absolutely. It was definitely a riff on that title, and I think it just captured so much of what I wanted to say about how I think I have seen leaders and people really at all levels of the workforce live their lives more effectively. And that was a big inspiration for writing the book as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is there sort of a central thesis or a main idea that you unpack, or is it more of an amalgamation of many tidbits?

Srini Pillay
I think it’s both. I think the central thesis in the book –  because the subtitle is Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind – I think a lot of people believe that in order to be effective at work, you just need to focus throughout the day. So their general days are focus, focus, focus, fatigue, and that’s the end of the day. And what this book describes is how building in periods of unfocus into your day strategically can actually help your brain out, and contrary to what people think, continuous focus can actually be a problem. So, in the book what I outline is, when focus is a problem, and then how unfocus can solve those problems and specifically what people can do in those 15-minute periods to maximize their productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, intriguing. And so, could you unpack a little bit of that? So, when does focus become a problem, and what’s the benefit of deliberately putting that unfocused time in there?

Srini Pillay
Yeah. There are a couple of disadvantages of focus. The first is that focus depletes the brain of energy. And studies have actually shown that if you take two groups of people and you ask one group to really focus on a video, and the other group to watch the video as usual, what you actually find is that after that if you ask them to solve a moral dilemma, the group that hyper-focused doesn’t care less, whereas the group that watched it as usual actually starts to care. And when you feed the group that hyper-focused glucose, they start to care again – indicating that focus can cause brain fatigue and compassion fatigue.
So if you’re someone who’s at work thinking, “God, I couldn’t care less about what these other people are doing”, or if you are a leading a team and you want to understand why it is that people are not pulling their weight in the team or they don’t seem to be helping one another – fatigue can deplete the brain of energy. So that’s the first disadvantage of focus.
The second is that focus actually is great if you’re just on task, but it also creates blinker vision, and as a result you can’t see what’s happening in the world. So for example, An Wang was somebody who discovered the word processor. And while he was busy making the second version, the PC was launched, but because he wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around him, he missed that and actually became bankrupt. So, you want to not be paying attention to what’s in front of you; you want to be paying attention to what’s in the wings as well.
The third thing is that focus makes you work with your nose to the grindstone, so effectively you’re just looking at what’s right in front of you, and as a result you miss upcoming trends. So you’re not seeing that robots may take over your job, you’re not seeing that when there’s a merger of your company with another company, it could impact your position, and as a result you don’t really anticipate the future. So focus prevents you from anticipating the future.
The fourth thing is that focus also prevents you from being creative. So, a lot of people, when they’re focused, work in silos. A classic example is Gillette, that had a toothbrush division and a battery division, and they were late to market as a battery-powered toothbrush. That’s because each division was so focused on itself, they were not able to actually make connections across divisions.
And the last thing is that focus itself is really useful for identity, if you want to describe yourself like your LinkedIn profile. It’s like the opposite of what you do. You knew that this was about a work-related thing, but you ask me about things outside of that. And part of that is that it gets me engaged in the essence of who I am. And focus is like a fork – it picks up all the concrete parts of your identity, whereas unfocus is like a spoon that picks up the delicious mélange of flavors of your personality. It’s like chopsticks that makes connections across different parts of the brain, or like a toothpick where it goes digging into nooks and crannies in your brain.
So, those five reasons – the fact that focus can deplete your brain of energy, number one; number two, focus can give you blinker vision; three, focus prevents you from seeing the future; four, focus prevents you from being creative; and five, focus prevents you from being yourself – are the reasons that I believe that it’s important to have focus. Of course, I’m a fan of focus, but also, to build unfocus into your day, because it’s unfocus that will give you energy, allow you to see within the periphery, it will allow you to see what’s lying ahead, it will make you more creative and more self-connected too.
And that’s the reason I wrote the book, because I wanted people to understand how they could become more unfocused, and strategically. Because there are definitely ways of being unfocused that do not work, like just being distracted is not helpful. But the brain actually has an unfocus circuit, which we call the “default mode network” that you can activate in very specific ways.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful and well-stated, in terms of five key things we can get our arms around, as well as rich metaphors. And “delicious mélange” is a phrase, the first time it’s been uttered on the show, and it needs to be said more. So, I like that. I need some more delicious mélanges literally and metaphorically, I think, in my world.
Well, the one that really hit me hardest, I think, on a personal level is when you talk about depleting compassion. And I think about how in my work day, I do a lot of focusing, being self-employed. Many people’s work days have, say, meetings that they don’t really need to be paying much attention to, for a good portion of them. I have none of that in my work day. It’s like every bit is scheduled and planned and requires focus.
And sure enough, I am pretty tuckered at the end of the day, and at times when my wife has requests or needs or thoughts, I think my compassion is much less accessible or ready to go than it is in the beginning of the day when she makes those same kinds of requests. And so, that’s a pretty powerful implication, just for the human condition and us being the people that we want to be.

Srini Pillay
It really is. And I think a lot of people are very hard-working, so they don’t even realize that they’re depleting their brain of this energy by just focusing. And they don’t even realize that the absolute truth is that every one of us daydreams for 46.9% of the day. So, what that means is that when we are focusing we’re depleting our brains. When we’re daydreaming, we’re trying to replenish our brains but we’re not doing it in the right way. There are ways that you can daydream that are really good for your brain, and there are ways that are not good.
And if you look at the workforce today and you look at Gallup statistics over the last few years, the engagement worldwide of workers is 13%, which means 87% of people worldwide are not engaged in their jobs. Now, it’s different in North America – it’s a little higher. It’s 30% are engaged in their jobs, but that still means that 7 out of 10 people are not really engaged. So, we’ve got to ask ourselves what are we doing, showing up to work the way we do? And are we just going to be going through the world with essentially half a tank of gas every day, deplete ourselves, and then do it all over again every day? At which point are we going to say, “You know what? I want my brain to be operating at its optimal, and I want my brain to be working in a way that it can work”? And I think we actually do ourselves a disservice when we deplete our brains of energy with focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d like to get into some of the particulars of the dosage and frequency and application of unfocus time. You mentioned 15 minutes. How should we think about, first of all, the scheduling of focus versus unfocus? Is there a sweet spot in terms of interval or ratio, or how do you think about that?

Srini Pillay
I think it’s different for different people, but there are some general frameworks. I’ll just say off the bat, one of the things that I like to say is that even though I’m going to be speaking in pretty pithy ways and doing a lot of “1, 2, 3” types of things, I don’t believe that everything works for everyone, and I think that everything that I’m presenting is a framework, even when there is a lot of research behind it. I still think that when people walk into my office, every person is different.
Having said that, when I say this to people, they say, “Oh, I’ve got no time to unfocus.” And what I say is, “Actually, you spend 46.9% of your day unfocusing. Why not learn to unfocus in a more productive way?” The second thing is, think of when your brain is in a natural slump anyway – either directly after lunch, middle of the afternoon, or the end of the day – start slowly by building in one or two 15-minute periods into your day, and do this every day. If you want to change that up because you want your unfocus periods to be at different times, then change that up. And if you say to yourself, “I can’t unfocus. Other people will be looking at me at work” – we’ll go through some of the techniques and you’ll see that there are things that you can do, even practically during your work day, that would really help you.
So, there are a few techniques which maybe I’ll mention off the bat. So if you’re at work and you’re thinking, “Okay, I heard this guy talk to me about why unfocus is important, and I buy it. I probably get a lot of my best ideas when I’m in the shower, I probably get my best ideas when I least expect them. Why don’t I just learn to unfocus? Well, how do I do that?” Here are a few techniques. The first is called “positive constructive daydreaming”. And at first that may just sound a little absurd, like how can daydreaming be positive and constructive?
Well, it’s been studied since the 1950s. Jerome Singer was one of the people who studied this phenomenon, and he found that slipping into a daydream is not helpful, and ruminating over the prior night’s indiscretions – maybe you had too much to drink and you said stuff you shouldn’t have said at a party – that kind of rumination is not helpful the next day either. However, what is helpful is positive constructive daydreaming. And I would ask people to just take out a piece of paper and a pen and write down the three steps so that you can practice it. The first is, find a 15-minute period, either during your lunch break, directly after lunch, in the middle of the afternoon, or at the end of the day.
Step number two – remember that the best way to do this is by doing something low-key. Sitting at your desk and letting your mind float off is not the best way to do positive constructive daydreaming. Rather, you should be knitting, gardening, or going for a walk. Now when I say that, a lot of people are like, “Oh, come on. I can’t just suddenly pull out the knitting needles at work and start knitting.” Well, you can, if you build that into the culture of your environment. But if you feel like that’s still a few steps away and you can’t get there, I think walking is the least offensive of all of them and you can do this in 15 minutes at the end of your lunch break. Now remember, there are different ways to walk, to change your brain as well. If you walk around the block in a rectangle, it actually is not as effective for creativity than if you walk in a zigzag or on a curvy path. So, when you’re walking, remember to do that. So, the second step is basically determining a time where you can actually do one of these activities.
The third step is once you are walking, or knitting, or maybe you have a potted   in the office that you’re tending to – so you don’t have to have a full garden at work – but once you’re doing one of those things, you then start imagining something positive or wishful. Maybe it’s lying on a beach, or possibly running through the woods with your dog – whatever for you feels positive or wishful. And these three steps can start you off on a 15-minute period of mind-wandering, which when done in this way, when you schedule it, when you allow your mind to go into this positive vision while you are doing something low-key – can actually replenish your brain, enhance your creativity, and refresh your brain and make you more productive too. So that’s technique number one, which you can build into any of those 15-minute segments.
Technique number two – I also get a response to this at some companies, when I say napping is important. Because 5 to 15 minutes of a nap can give you one to three hours of clarity. Now, if you ask yourself, “How can I nap, and why should I nap?” Well, we all know what it’s like to drown ourselves after lunch. Sometimes you have a heavy lunch and you feel like, “God, I just can’t stay awake.” Or it’s the middle of the afternoon and you feel like you’ve got to get a project done, but what you do is, you do it without all your horsepower, rather than replenishing your brain and giving yourself the power that you need.
Now, if you find that it’s impossible to put your head on your desk because people will be looking at you, have a team meeting and talk about this research, and then talk about the fact that companies like Google, like Zappos actually have napping pods at their businesses because they realize how important it is to nap. And I can tell you there are a number of other companies right now that are realizing that building napping into a work day is essential. If you want to be creative, 90 minutes of napping is better than just 5 to 15 minutes, but that’s a little unrealistic for during the week. It’s something you can do maybe on the weekend, if you have a creative project, or maybe at the end of your day, when you feel like you need to spend a little extra time at work.
The third thing is doodling. You were talking about being in a meeting and you don’t always need to attend the meeting – well, it turns out Jackie Andrade and her colleagues found that doodling improves memory by 29%. So just scribbling on a piece of paper while you’re on a conference call, or even while we’re on a call like this, can actually improve your memory by 29%.
And then the fourth technique that I’ll mention – and the book is really filled with a bunch of techniques – but one of my favorites is a term that I coined called “psychological Halloweenism”. And psychological Halloweenism is based on a study that showed that if you take two groups of people and you give them a creative problem, and one group behaves like an eccentric poet, while the other group behaves like a rigid librarian – the group that takes on the identity of an eccentric poet is statistically significantly more creative than the group that takes on the identity of the librarian. And that’s because when you’re embodying that identity, you are thinking outside of your usual thought patterns and you’re thinking like someone that you’re not.
So, this is something I would recommend doing at dinner with your family, on a date – maybe not the first date, but after that, and also with a creative team at work, or your friends. Just say, “Today why don’t I just behave like someone I truly like, and think like that person? What would this person do on this particular day?” So these kinds of exercises are exercises that we can all build into our days to activate the default mode network or the unfocus circuit, to be able to increase our creativity and increase our productivity and energy as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And the phrase “psychological Halloweenism” is really a fun one, because it really gets you thinking, in terms of, on Halloween you put on a costume and you become another character, whether it’s Darth Vader or Spider-Man or whatever that might be. And I find that helpful. I remember one time, I was maybe 12 years old and I was playing basketball. I’m not that good at basketball, but I just decided that my name was Freight Train and that I was really aggressive and tough. [laugh] As kids do. And then I stopped, and my buddy said, “When you were Freight Train, you were actually playing a lot better basketball.”

Srini Pillay
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And similarly if I’m trying to write something and maybe I’m trying to write something persuasive, it’s like, “What would Bob Cialdini do right now? He’d probably…” And then what do you know – I’ve written something that I think is pretty good, in terms of meeting those goals. So, it’s wild how just consciously choosing that can make a world of difference.

Srini Pillay
Absolutely. And if you’re unconvinced of that, try that when you’re working out. So, when you’re working out, lift weights as you usually do, and then say to yourself, “What if I was…”, and think of any person you embody and any person that you would like to be, or any person whose determination you actually enjoy. And I remember doing this once during a workout, which amused my trainer. He looks at me and he was like, “Wow, you already did those chest presses as if they were nothing.” And I said, “It’s kind of weird, because one of the people whose determination I really admire is Serena Williams, the tennis player. And I just decided to embody Serena in that one minute.” He was like, “There are so many other people you could choose. How did you choose her?” I was like, “I don’t know. I just decided to do that.”
And in that moment, I had a different mentality, and I think part of it was not just… Obviously there are many people who have physical strength that’s probably greater than hers, but she has a sense of determination that I felt like I really wanted to embody. I wanted to be like, “Whatever this limit is, I can go beyond it.” So try it out while you’re working out, and you’ll see that it makes a big difference, even in how you lift weights.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, that’s cool. So, can you talk a little bit about… It’s interesting because psychological Halloweenism in a way is still a form of focusing. It’s like, “I’m doing this as…”, and that kind of takes some mental energy. But yet, it is rejuvenating to the brain.

Srini Pillay
Yeah, it really is. We’re stuck in my own heads the whole day. Sometimes I bore myself; I’m like “Oh my God, here I go again. Same problem, another day. I do the same nonsense over and over again.” So, when you’re feeling like that, just say, “Why don’t I just think like somebody else?” Even people you don’t like, but people who are successful, you might be able to embody. And if you embody them, it might give you a completely different idea.
I’ve done this at corporate workshops, and people will go into this state, and first they go into it hesitantly, because they’re like, “Oh my God, this is like an acting class.” But then they realize that what they’re actually doing is challenging themselves to think outside of their habit circuits. Their habits circuits in the brain have them trapped and they have their minds going in a loop. And if they can think outside of habit circuits, then they can actually think in novel ways and increase their creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent, thank you. Well, there are a few other tidbits in your book I want to touch upon as well. You mention a concept called the “beat of our brain”. What’s that about?

Srini Pillay
Yeah, so the beat of the brain was really the introduction to the book, where I wanted to say that nobody can listen to a song that is on high the whole time, unless you’re in a moment of metal glory. But even then you want it to build up to a place and have a crescendo. A brain is very similar. A brain has “on” and “off” components. There are times when there’s an “on”, and there’s a time when there’s an “off”.
And the beat of the brain was basically saying that our brains need periods of focus and unfocus, and in order to engage the beat in the brain you really need to focus, but then build these unfocused periods into your day so as to access your brain’s deepest qualities.
Remember, the unfocused brain is very much tapping into the unconscious, and I think most people would agree that the majority of brain processes are likely outside of conscious awareness. You’re not aware of what’s making your heart beat, you’re not aware of what’s making you breathe, you’re not even aware of what’s going on in your Freudian unconscious, or in implicit processing. There are a lot of different things that are completely outside of awareness. So, if we can tap into that…
What I say to people is that focus is the time when you pick up the puzzle pieces; unfocus is giving your brain time to put those pieces together. And if you look at a lot of important people – people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates – they all build unfocus times, especially if they’re in a time of crisis. Mark Zuckerberg – when he was having problems at Facebook, approached Steve Jobs and said, “What should I do?” And basically Steve Jobs said, “Build a long period of unfocus, go somewhere else, and just see what happens.” So, it may sound like it’s just taking you away from your work, and in a sense it is, but it’s only taking you away from your work so that you can return to that work refreshed. And the beat of the brain is essentially having a regular beat of focus and unfocus during your day.

Pete Mockaitis
That comparison to music – that’s where I find some, I guess, speakers are so much easier to listen to in terms of, there’s some vocal variety there. And we had a guest – Rodger Love, a voice coach, speak about that, and how that makes a world of difference, in terms of being engaging and feeling something. And there are some TV shows where maybe every sentence feels like it’s intense and in capital letters and bold font, and I just can’t endure it for very long. There has to be some lulls in there for the music and the adoption of engagement for me. So, I’m also intrigued to hear, when you talk about these 15-minutes zones – are there likewise benefits to having full days of unfocused time, or how does that play into things?

Srini Pillay
Yes, absolutely. I think for a lot of people… And it really depends a little bit on your career, but I think what a full day of unfocused time does is, it gives you time away from something that you’ve been hard at work at for a long time. So, I’ve worked with companies where they will say one day a month is your day to… Sometimes some of them just say, “It’s your day to take off”, and some of them say, “It’s your day to go to the local museum and find a piece of art that you like, take a photograph of it while you’re there and share it with us.” And then at the next meeting, we’ll start off by just talking about people’s responses to the art. And what it does is it allows you to connect in completely different ways when you do that kind of thing.
Also, hobbies can actually be very protective to the brain. And studies have basically shown that for example if you look at the success of scientists – scientists who have the greatest citations also have the greatest number of hobbies or things that they’re doing. With one caveat – that the hobby needs to have some connection to the primary work as well.
So, I play tennis for example. I’m also not great at it, but I love it, I’m completely obsessed with it. And whenever I can get a chance to play tennis, I do. But when I’m playing tennis I’m thinking about when to be offensive, when to be defensive, when to relax into the point. And all of this really gives me a lot of food for thought in my other work, in my day-to-day work, when I’m thinking about running… I have three tech companies that I’ve co-founded and I’m thinking about when to be aggressive, when to be defensive, when I’m trying to execute a strategy and I’m trying too hard and I realize actually I should relax away from that.
I think taking a day off just helps your entire brain to reset. So, I do think entire days off can be very replenishing to your brain, and I really think people need to recognize we don’t say… Sometimes it can be a drag to do certain things like your morning ablutions, or if you’re filling your gas tank. But these are all things that you need to do to energize. When you’re taking a shower, you feel good. I think especially as you grow older, you realize that you’ve got to re-conceptualize your life, because your body doesn’t work the way that it used to work. And even when you’re at work, I would strongly recommend, if it’s possible, finding if there’s a way for you to stretch or roll, or building that into your day so that you can actually recognize that you need to re-conceptualize your life.
The reason I went off on that tangent relative to building it into your whole day, is that I think when we take days off, days off of physical activity can also be really replenishing. It takes you away from this constant mental struggle, it engages your body, and your body itself carries a lot of intelligence in it. So, long story short – yes, a day off can help. During that day, consider physical activities and hobbies, because they’ll both strengthen your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, excellent. Thank you. And how do you recommend we conjure creativity? Are there any tips above and beyond these breaks?

Srini Pillay
Yeah. I think creativity is a remarkable thing, because it involves multiple parts of the brain. So when I work with companies or I work with people, I’m usually thinking things like, “How can I help this person become more innovative?” The first thing, as I said – any of those unfocus techniques would improve your creativity, so that’s number one. Number two – I would suggest that before you even start on any creative exercise, engage in possibility thinking. Now when I say this, people sometimes roll their eyes and they’re like, “Oh my God, I hope he’s not going to go off on some tangent about why anything’s possible.”
And I’m not. What I’m going to say is that we often justify our lives based on reality, but nothing exceptional was ever made from the substrate of a current reality without invoking something that doesn’t exist. And so, the airplane, the Internet, the telephone – everything that you can think of that affords us some kind of convenience, was created from a space of possibility.
And that’s because when you operate from a space of possibility, you actually are allowing your brain to increase its dopamine, so it feels more rewarded, and it also increases its opioids and as a result it feels less stressed. And without the stress and with this reward, your brain leans into the creative experience much more than if it were just generally plotting along, saying, “Let me see what’s possible.”
Let’s say you have a 9 to 5 job and your job is to punch in figures into an Excel spreadsheet. Yesterday I was sort of dreading this. I used to do this a long time ago, but I don’t do this often. If you actually just take a step aside and say… I would do this, and I was like, “I can’t re-enter all these figures in manually. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a formula?”
I tried out a couple of different formulae, they didn’t work. And I thought, “I have a friend, I’ll give him a call and see if he knows how to implement this formula.” And so, if I had not had the thought that it might be possible to automate the data, I wouldn’t even have called anyone. So, I think that possibility thinking is a very powerful way of jumpstarting creativity, because it puts you into a frame of mind where whatever you are envisioning becomes your goal, and then you work toward it, even if you don’t know how to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so then, to trigger that, it’s just about asking the bigger question, or how do you recommend getting there?

Srini Pillay
So, the first thing is to say, “What do I want, no matter how wild it is?” So let’s say you want to be able to work the same job, but have fewer hours, and you really can’t imagine how. Start with that hypothesis. All good science starts with a hypothesis. So start with a hypothesis, write it down, and say, “Even though I don’t know how to get there, I’m going to figure this out.” And remember, figuring it out is not like, “Now let me sit down and figure out a strategy.” It’s a combination of focus and unfocus, because unfocus will put those puzzle pieces together for you.
So the initiating factor there is to simply articulate whatever your audacious goal is, no matter how audacious it is, and then reverse-engineer what that is. I think Steve Jobs was who said, “You can’t join the dots in life moving forward, but you can join them backwards.” So, when you’re moving forward, what Steve Jobs said was that you have to believe in something – and he called it gut, karma, life, destiny, whatever. Really what he was saying was, generate a hypothesis, no matter what it is, and then test it. So I think generating the hypothesis is the way to begin.
Then in terms of other ways to engineer creativity, there are a lot of other ways besides the unfocus techniques. One of them involves the frontal polar cortex of the brain, which is basically, if you put your hand on your forehead, just behind your forehead is where this part of the brain is. And this part of the brain is involved in making connections, and it makes connections across a certain distance. So, when you’re wanting to be creative, you can take the problem you have at hand and you try to say, “How can I liken this to something else?”
Now, I’ll give you a real life example. I worked with a company that was thinking about how to develop a concept of a trusted advisor. So, a lot of times people will get into the room and brainstorm a bunch of ideas, but what we did was, we used this particular kind of thinking, which is called “analogical thinking”, which basically means you come up with analogies so that the frontal polar cortex – the very front of your brain – can map what you want onto different examples. I got the group together and I said, “When you think of … some qualities?”, and people said a mother, a dog, a reliable car.
So we are developing what a trusted advisor is in the company. What properties does a mother have? A mother is nurturing, is unconditional, is advising. Okay, that’s great. We’ve got those properties. What properties does a dog have? A dog is always by your side. What properties does a reliable car have? It will take you from place A to place B. Okay, so let’s create a trusted advisor who’s nurturing, always by your side, and will take you from where you are to where you want to go, and let’s to build the processes to develop that.
So here you see that by using analogical thinking, you can connect what you want to an analogy, and the frontal polar cortex of your brain actually begins to enhance that creativity. Now, there’s a distance in meaning between what you want, like the trusted advisor, and the example you’re using. And that distance is called “semantic distance”. Studies show that middle semantic distance is fine.
So, if I say, “What’s the difference between a trusted advisor and a dog, or a mother, or a reliable car?” – that’s middle semantic distance. They’re a little way out, but they make sense. However, if I said, “What about a spaceship, or what about a hydrogen atom?” These things are a little bit more obscure, and although you may be able to figure out what that is, it may be so discouraging that it’s best not to start with that.
So, aside from those unfocus technique, I would recommend possibility thinking and analogical thinking by essentially developing this analogy to activate the creative part of the brain that’s right behind your forehead.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, thank you. Well, Srini, tell me – anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Srini Pillay
There’s a lot to say. What I want to say is, most importantly, that eventually no matter what frameworks you hear, no matter what techniques I’m prescribing, your ingenuity really lies within you. And in my coaching practice I have seen that it’s not people who follow the frameworks, but people who invite more of themselves to the table to engage those frameworks who are the most successful. And I don’t just mean this in a kind of soft way.
There’s a project called the One Laptop Per Child project, where they dropped computer tablets in rural Ethiopia where kids had never seen technology before. And they literally were wondering, “What would they do with it? Would they sit on it? Would they try to eat it? What would they try to do?” What they found was that within a couple of hours they found the “on / off” switch. Within a couple of days they were singing “ABC” songs, and within a couple of weeks to a month, they had actually hacked Android.
And what this says is that you don’t need an education in something to activate your ingenuity. I think that education to a large extent prevents us from seeing our greatest capabilities. And it doesn’t matter what your level of education is. Remember, your greatest friend is your own ingenuity, and these frameworks are just accompaniments on your journey to greater productivity and creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal, thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Srini Pillay
There are so many quotes. I think from a work position, one of my favorite quotes is a quote by Warren Bennis, who I think is the father of all leadership studies, who after all his many years of studying leaders came to one conclusion about what a leader is. And Warren Bennis said, “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that easy, and also that difficult.” And I think that’s what’s so impressive about the leaders that we see that we truly admire. They have become themselves, and that’s the reason that I particularly like that quote.
I also like a lot of quotes by Oscar Wilde, who often will emphasize the importance of youth slipping away and the importance of time passing. And while I don’t intend to take a negative view on that, I have a very simple philosophy on life, which is that you live, you die, you do something in between. It’s important to make the best of every minute. And when you find your mind is in a negative spiral, remind yourself of that.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study, experiment or a bit of research?

Srini Pillay
There are lots of studies that I think I particularly love. That energy study I particularly like because I think we’re living in a time of disengagement, and the fact that feeding people glucose and re-energizing their brains is helpful. I think it’s relevant today because burnout is so high, engagement is so low, that if we can learn to build unfocused times into our day and feed ourselves with time and space and food, I think that that’s particularly exciting.
Another group of studies that I’m inspired by is a group of studies that looked at what connects stress with the body. And what these studies found was that the mitochondria – the cell’s energy factory – is the place where stress exerts its impact on your body. And because it changes how energy is metabolized, it can be connected to heart disease, to stroke, it can be connected to cancer. So, if you’re feeling stress and you’re like, “That’s fine” – it’s not just a psychological condition. The fact that we now know that stress impacts the energy within your cells indicates that it can influence different organ systems in your body as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite book?

Srini Pillay
I think my favorite book is Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, and also Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence. They are old books, but I particularly love them because within the fiction is contained a host of non-fiction about human sensitivity. And I think humans are first and foremost extremely sensitive, and coming to this world with a set of very powerful intentions that get dwindled down as they begin to face challenges like anxiety and uncertainty. And I think, paradoxically, it is in these books that we see these human challenges come to life.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

Srini Pillay
A favorite tool… I’m not very handy. This is a bit of a nerdy response, but what I just did last night, where I literally got up and had some kind of peak life experience. I would say it’s statistics. I think online computing tools for statistics are my favorite tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Is there a particular one?

Srini Pillay
Yesterday what I did was, I had a bunch of correlation coefficients I had to run. So I just used Excel, I ran a Pearson correlation, then changed that to finding R², and ran an R² formula. And then I used an online tool that could give me a P-value for the R-value. I just Googled “P-value for R-values for correlations”, and used that tool that was online.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And how about a favorite habit?

Srini Pillay
I’m not a huge fan of habits in general. One of my philosophies in life, which I think is on my Twitter profile is, when I describe myself I say, “Somewhere between martinis and meditation.” And I think my favorite habit is to switch between those two modes, because I feel like one gives me access to the spiritual world, and the other to a more carnal world. And I think that that combination really helps to enhance my sensitivity in a way that helps me in my day-to-day life.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate and get retweeted and repeated back to you frequently?

Srini Pillay
Yeah. When people ask me how do I manage my anxiety, one of the things I do is I tell them I have a mnemonic called CIRCA, which essentially is, I would ask you to take out a piece of paper and a pen and write down “C” is for “chunky”, which is whenever a problem confronts you, you break it down. “I” is for ignore mental chatter”, which is when you have a problem and you start being self-critical, ignore your mental chatter. And rather than paying attention to your mental chatter, focus on your breath – it’s a form of mindfulness. The “R” is “reality check”, and reality check is essentially, “This too shall pass.” So use self-talk just to remind yourself that this too shall pass. The “C” is “control check”. Let go of stuff you can’t control; there’s nothing you can do about it. And “A” is “attention shift”, which is whenever you’re faced with a problem, place your attention on the solution rather than the problem. And the mnemonic is CIRCA.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Srini Pillay
I’m on Facebook, I’m on Twitter. My website is DrSriniPillay.com. I’m also at NeuroBusinessGroup.com, or NBGCorporate.com. And if you’d like to join our mailing list, do so as well. I love interacting with people and sharing the information, because I learn that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Srini Pillay
Yeah. I think tomorrow what I’d like you to do is find one 15-minute period, decide on one of the unfocus activities that we talked about, and implement it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Srini, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom, and good luck in all you’re doing with NeuroBusiness Group and the book and more!

Srini Pillay
Thank you so much, Pete.